Every August has a name the league has quietly given up on, and this year it is Patrik Laine. He played five games for Montreal last season, registered a single point, and vanished so completely from the conversation that his name now surfaces mainly in hypotheticals about which power-play-starved team should take a flyer. Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath the shrug: the hypotheticals are right, and Montreal has every reason to make one of them real.
| Player | Games | Points | On-ice xGF% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cole Caufield | 81 | 88 | 63% |
| Ivan Demidov | 82 | 62 | 59% |
| Juraj Slafkovsky and the rest | Full seasons | Productive | Positive |
| Patrik Laine | 5 | 1 | Buried |
Start with why he disappeared, because it was not a mystery of form. Montreal's wings are the deepest young group in hockey. Cole Caufield scored 51 goals, Ivan Demidov put up 62 points as a rookie, and the depth chart behind them runs long and young. On a roster like that, a veteran scorer coming off injuries does not get patience; he gets passed. Laine's five games were less a verdict on his hands than a math problem about ice time, and the math is not going to change in his favor.
What he still is when he plays
The shot did not go anywhere. Laine remains one of the purest finishers of his generation, the kind of shooter who can run a power play from the left circle and turn a middling unit into a weapon, and that skill ages better than almost any other. He is 28, not 35. The question was never whether he can score; it is whether a team can live with the rest of his game long enough to let him. For a club with a broken power play, that trade-off is worth making, and the league knows which clubs those are. The chatter this week has named the Islanders and the Flyers, two teams whose power plays ranked among the worst in the league, and the logic writes itself.
Why Montreal should sell
From Montreal's side, keeping him helps nobody. The Canadiens are building around Lane Hutson, Caufield and Demidov, the young core that made their 106-point season more than a mirage, and a buried veteran winger contributes nothing to that project except a cap hit and an awkward question at camp. Any return at all, a mid-round pick, a depth defenceman, retained-salary relief, beats another season of Laine watching from the press box while the kids play. Assets rot on the shelf, and this one has been on the shelf for a year.
The buyer's case, honestly
For a team like the Islanders, the bet is cheap and asymmetric. The acquisition cost for a player with five games and one point is close to nothing, the cap hit can be managed with retention, and the upside is a proven 40-goal shooter fixing the exact special-teams problem that sank your season. Mathew Barzal needs a finisher, the power play needs a trigger man, and Laine is both on his best days. If it fails, you have lost a late pick. If it works, you have bought the cheapest 25 goals on the market. Asymmetric bets like that are how smart mid-tier teams close gaps.
The risk nobody should pretend away
The honest version of the downside: Laine has to stay healthy and has to be played, and both have been genuine problems. A season this lost leaves rust, his five-on-five game has always required sheltering, and a coach who does not commit to him on the first unit will get the worst of the bargain, a passenger without the payoff. Teams that acquire Laine half-heartedly end up regretting it; the move only works as a full commitment to rebuilding his role around the shot. Any buyer should go in clear-eyed about that, because the player has never worked as a part-time solution.
The window is now
Timing matters here, and it favors moving quickly. Training camps open in three weeks, and the September scramble, when teams confront their actual rosters and start solving problems in a hurry, is when a deal like this gets done. Montreal's leverage only shrinks once camp starts and Laine is visibly outside the lineup again, and a buyer's appetite is highest before the season exposes its power play all over again. Both sides are better off transacting in the next month than in December, and everyone involved knows it.
The precedents cut both ways
The league has run this experiment before, and the results are instructive in both directions. Buried scorers moved for pennies have repeatedly turned into heists: the pattern of a change of scenery reviving an elite shot is one of the most reliable in hockey, because finishing is the skill least dependent on the environment that suppressed it. A team gets the volume shooter out of a crowded depth chart, hands him the first-unit flank he lost, and the goals that looked gone turn out to have been merely unscheduled. Every general manager can recite the cautionary tales of selling that kind of talent at its floor.
The other side of the ledger is real too. Some buried veterans stay buried because the burial was information: the defensive game had eroded past playability, the durability was gone, the fit problems followed them. Laine's five-game season means a buyer is bidding on a player nobody has seen at speed for a year, and that opacity is exactly why the price is low. The bet is asymmetric, not riskless, and the difference between the heist version and the cautionary version usually comes down to whether the acquiring coach builds a role around the shot or asks the player to earn one shift by shift. History says the second approach fails with Laine every time it has been tried.
Which is why the fit matters more than the fee. The right buyer is a team with a first-unit vacancy, a play-driving centre who can carry the five-on-five load, and a coach secure enough to live with the trade-offs. The wrong buyer is one hoping he becomes something he has never been. The market this week is effectively sorting itself into those two categories, and Montreal's return will depend on finding the former before camp forces the question.
Where this lands
Patrik Laine is the rare buried asset whose skill is not in question, only his fit, and Montreal is the rare seller with no reason at all to hold. The Canadiens' young wings have made him redundant, the power-play-starved half of the league has made him relevant, and the calendar has made the next few weeks the moment. Somebody should trade for him, commit to the shot, and find out if the league gave up a year too early on one of its best finishers. The worst outcome is losing a late pick. The best is the bargain of the offseason.