The 2024 NHL Entry Draft is rapidly approaching on June 28 in Las Vegas. Obviously, the Montreal Canadiens hold the fifth-overall pick and many are expecting them to draft a forward who will round out their top six, boosting their offense, which finished a dreadful 26th in the league in 2023-24. All that’s fair and good.
The issue is expectations regarding that eventual draft pick’s NHL debut should be tempered. It’s highly probable they fail to join the Canadiens for a few years. Nevertheless, the offense is poised to get a boost from at least one other top-five pick come 2024-25.
Kirby Dach Poised to Return
After playing just two games to start 2023-24 before suffering a season-ending injury, Kirby Dach, who got drafted third overall in 2019, is poised to return next season. He alone won’t push the team into the playoffs, but it’s fair to assume he, should he stay healthy, will do a lot of the heavy lifting on a team that missed them by 15 points and lost 27 one-goal games.
Granted, it’s not like the Canadiens can guarantee they’ll appear in those amount of one-goal games again. However, by sheer logic, it’s at least probable they have more luck in that department. It’s not even the fact that 16 of those games went to overtime/shootout. You can’t really call it an issue with luck, in that they also won 10 such games. The difference isn’t exactly statistically significant. It’s more so those 11 other one-goal games in which the Habs theoretically came close to capturing at least single points in the standings (and potentially two).
Dach should help out with that, presumably as the team’s second-line centre, a job he had won out of training camp last season and did nothing to lose in the two games he did get in before getting injured (two assists). Sure, Alex Newhook did a fine job filling in down the stretch for Dach in that role, upon returning from an injury of his own. However, it’s abundantly clear the latter did a better job making his linemates better the previous season, when he scored 38 points in 58 games either on the wing of the top line with Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield or centering the second line with Sean Monahan out himself.
Take that production as a conservative projection of what Dach will bring to the table in 2024-25. Those are effectively 38 more points they didn’t get last season. Some may argue Newhook’s 34 points in 55 games effectively replicated Dach’s output, rendering the point moot. However, in an ideal world, where fellow-centre Christian Dvorak gets moved in the offseason, everyone theoretically moves down a rung, adding to the team’s overall depth.
Canadiens Need a Little Injury Luck
It’s an admitted oversimplification of the situation, in that you’d probably also have to take into account the 35 points in 49 games Monahan scored, largely deployed at centre, before he got traded. However, the bottom line is the Canadiens are a deeper, more offensively capable team with Dach’s 54 pro-rated points in the lineup than Dvorak’s 25.
So, forget the bad-luck implications in the one-goal games for now. All the Canadiens need is more decent luck on the injury front, after they led the league in man-games lost for two straight seasons from 2021-23. They took steps in 2023-24 to returning to the mean, but were still among the league leaders in that category. Hell, even if the status quo were to hold true for all intents and purposes and only Dach were to get a healthy dose of decent luck instead, the Habs would be incredibly far better off as a whole.
It’s admittedly odd to lay an entire team’s fortunes at the feet of a 23-year-old forward who’s never so much as scored 40 points in a season in the NHL. However, a little perspective is in order. No one’s suggesting Dach alone will catapult the team into Stanley Cup contention, only that, after three straight losing seasons (during 2.5 of which the team was actively rebuilding), it’s fair to assume the Canadiens are on the verge of (further) improving drastically (from 55 points in 2021-22, to 68 in 2022-23 and 76 last year).
Dach just happens to personify the entire team as a young player with great potential primed to break out, as long as he just starts to get some luck going his way. Contending for a playoff berth in 2024-25 under those circumstances is far from out of the question. In fact, it should be expected, similar to how everybody just about knows general manager Kent Hughes will draft a forward at the end of this week.
Related: What Canadiens Will Do This Offseason, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Hughes may very well not. However, it would be incredibly shocking were he to deviate from what’s inherently logical. Even with Dach back, they still need to get at least one additional surefire top-six forward in the system to realistically contend in relatively short order. They’re at least in a pretty good position to do just that, in more ways than one. First things first, though.
