Team bounces back with ‘good practice’ after drubbing
Montreal goes big at centre, and top pick Kotkaniemi could turn out to be next Koivu
It was a good draft for the Canadiens.
How good? Get back to me in four or five years.
When you’re drafting applecheeked youngsters such as Jesperi Kotkaniemi, prospects are as uncertain as a baby’s bottom. But the 2018 draft has the potential to be a watershed one for the Canadiens. In terms of both quantity and quality, Trevor Timmins and Marc Bergevin might have done enough to make this a turning point after 25 years of failure and frustration.
No matter how it turns out, you have to like the way the Canadiens handled the draft. They didn’t panic. They didn’t deal away picks in a fruitless search for a short-term fix.
And they were willing to take a little bit of a risk with the No. 3 overall pick to land that elusive big, talented centre. And they didn’t they stop there: with 10 selections Saturday, the Canadiens picked up six more centres — an unprecedented haul.
If Kotkaniemi and Ryan Poehling (last year’s first-rounder) pan out, the Canadiens have put an end to a run of frustration that goes back to March 23, 1999. That’s when Réjean Houle, in one of his less-noted terrible trades, dealt Vincent Damphousse to the San Jose Sharks for three draft picks that became (read ’em and weep) Marcel Hossa, Marc-André Thinel and Kiel McLeod.
Thus, do great sports dynasties become also-rans.
It’s hard to believe now, but as recently as 1996, the Canadiens had three premier centres on the roster in Pierre Turgeon, Saku Koivu and Damphousse (although big Vinnie also played left wing.) Houle bookended the Damphousse trade with the one that sent Turgeon to St. Louis. With that, the club’s depth chart of elite centres was reduced to Koivu, and frequent injuries, illness and terrible luck left the club without Koivu a good part of the time.
Fast forward to 2018, when the Canadiens drafted Kotkaniemi, another Finnish centre, 25 years after Koivu was chosen. If Kotkaniemi has half Koivu’s heart, this could be a splendid pick. It could also go south. When the Canadiens marched to the microphone in Dallas to announce their pick (part of that absurd NHL charade that requires a couple of dozen people to announce one draft choice) the surest picks were either super-scorer Filip Zadina or big Brady Tkachuk.
But Tkachuk went to Ottawa at No. 4, Zadina fell into the laps of the delighted Detroit Red Wings at No. 6, and the Canadiens got their centre. Let the secondguessing begin.
On April 29, I wrote the Canadiens should draft Kotkaniemi with the third overall choice in the draft and on June 22 they did exactly that. (I fervently hope there was no connection between what I wrote and the player they chose because if the Habs start listening to journalists, they’re in real trouble.)
There was some talk in media circles the Kotkaniemi draft was a big shock to Canadiens fans: that might have been true a couple of weeks ago, but with the young Finn moving up most draft charts, and the more knowledgeable fans understanding how desperately the club needed a top centre, Kotkaniemi was topping at least some fan polls ahead of Friday’s draft.
It was Grant McCagg of recrutes.ca who put me onto Kotkaniemi and, after watching the young man at the U18 tournament, I had to agree. Kotkaniemi won me over with his performance during the gold-medal game against the U.S. at the U18. The youngster won’t turn 18 until July 6, but he was cool as a Chicoutimi cucumber in that game.
In the final minutes, with the U.S. goalie pulled and the Americans with the extra man, Kotkaniemi was out there almost without pause. He made excellent decisions, stayed calm in every situation, took the big faceoffs in his own end and generally performed like a seasoned NHL veteran.
“There are some similarities between (Mark) Scheifele and Kotkaniemi at the same age,” McCagg said in his draft guide, adding Kotkaniemi is “far from a finished product, but (made a) marked improvement all season, especially in his skating, and (has) all the attributes to be a first-line centre, including size, character, puck skills, sense and vision.”
Kotkaniemi has also been compared to Anze Kopitar, which cuts a lot of ice in my halfSlovenian household. Kopitar (who in my opinion should have won the Hart Trophy) is big, strong, skilled, smart and can play equally well at either end of the ice.
If that’s what the Canadiens got in this draft, the future looks bright. There have been a series of encouraging moves since the end of the season, including the hirings of Dominique Ducharme and Joël Bouchard and (perhaps) even the trade that shipped Alex Galchenyuk out of town.
After reading Pat Hickey’s piece last week on the difficulties with Galchenyuk’s father, I now think the trade for Max Domi might have been a necessary deal, another step toward a team in which everyone is on the same page, working toward the same goal — and there is a big centreman to lead the way on that top line.