Rate the 22-23 season...

[Cranky]

Rate the 22-23 and how it met or failed your expectations.

For me, I was expecting it to be a learning season for the kids, particularly on defense and it turned out to be wheelchair season.

Those vets that we carried either got injured and/or unworthy of used pucks.

About the only saving grace is that we landed up low enough to have a shot at Fantilli or Bedard.

At this point after 6 decades, I'm beaten to a bystander that has barely any interest in the game to game machination.Although I am happy for Mol$on because as always, he makes a profit.

What's you take?

[folatre]

For me being bottom five and in the thick of the lottery in a draft with Bedard and some other real gems is a positive. If most of the kids had been able to stay healthy and log more development time, I would have been very pleased with 2022-23.

Unfortunately, too many young guys lost too much time to injury and for that reason I would say it just an okay season.

[Scotty D]

one forward one back, Injuries were absolutely insane beyond any kind of normalcy and it's not a new one off situation its a trend and seems like an annual situation but that said it has to be that MGMNT needs to take a serious look at the why, they already know and are making it a priority but its been going on for years it seems and long overdue (Canadiens' management determined to keep injuries from halting momentum in rebuild/sportsnet ) hopefully they can get to some answers fast and design a training regime for the team that will help alleviate this situation along with the type of grit in the lineup that will make Us the ones dolling out a healthy balance of pain along with skill to make other teams weary of pushing us around.

Hope we pull the rabbit in the draft or some type of miraculaous Sam pollock type of events occur and we get things moving quicker but momma always tryed to instill in me that whole patience is a virtue thing so there's that.

[Willie Dog]

I chose one step forward and one step back....

I look at the season as a whole and I think the one step back is that the injuries cost valuable development time to the young players and also hurt the trade value of the injured vets which has cost us draft picks in this upcoming draft.

The one step forward consists of 2 parts... if the guys who got injured hadn't gotten injured I don't think we would be 5th worst in the league, I think we would have been higher in the standings and had worse lottery percentage so that is the one step forward... Another step forward is these injuries have forced a re-evaluation of the entire health management of the players, when HuGo came in they added a number of player development functions and other current methods fir asset management that the Habs never had, but they left the health management side of it the same... this was their mistake, it should have been a clean slate... hopefully changes are made

[Skilly]

I don’t know how you can call this season anything but a disaster

We lost a season of development for Slafkovsky
We lost a season of development for Caufield
Suzuki did not become the PPG first liner , so an argument could be made he lost development time
We lost a season of development for Guhle
We lost the possibility of getting a return on Monahan
We still have Hoffman
We still have the Price anchor
We very likely won’t be drafting Bedard (or Fantilli)


About the only positives were

Kirby Dach
Drouin’s contract is expired

[folatre]

It could be worse. Detroit, for example, missed the playoffs for the seventh straight year and objectively did not make progress in comparison to last year. And their GM is trading NHLers entering their prime (Hronek and Bertuzzi) for magic beans, perhaps hedging his bets with a new rebuild on top of a very long rebuild.

[Tankdriver]

Better than expected.

Caulfield showed that he has the potential to score 40...

5 Rookies playing defence for the majority of the year. Never would we have seen that in a Julien or Therrien years.

A real effort to develop players

Expiring contracts

Dach was better than I expected.

Monty become a good goalie

[Disgruntled70sHab]

The biggest story was the amount of injuries ... another storyline was the emergence of Martin St. Louis as a top-notch coach, mentor, and leader ... as with Carey Price before him, I felt he carried the team this year ... MSL is currently the team's leader both on and off the ice, IMHO ... seeing the emergence of Rafael Harvey-Pinard was fun to watch ... unless he implodes at camp, he's won a job with le club for next year, methinks ... liked the emergence of Arber Xhekaj, as well ... Justin Barron, eh ... thank you, Colorado ... Sean Monahan says he feels pretty good, and he'd like to play with the Habs in the future (Stu Cowan) ... if he's completely healed, and willing to take a one-year deal for reasonable bucks, I'd sign him ... the team was better with him in the lineup ... as far as goaltending goes, here's a big thanks to Samuel Montembeault, who often saw more rubber than a dead skunk on the Trans-Canada ... I'd also like to see the organization start to move away from the Cayden Primeau experiment ... finally, thanks to Trevor Timmins ... granted, many of the prospects we saw this year, were in the lineup because of the injuries ... but, many of those prospects we saw were drafted by Timmins ...

Cheers.

[seventeen]

I picked better than expected. I didn't think we were the worst team in the league. Last season was the tail end of the Bergevin dynasty and his ineptness was in full glory. Ducharme was dumped and MSL began his journey in this, his first full season.

So....we finished 5th last, which was in the area I was hoping for...giving us a small chance at Bedard but a very good chance at an elite player.
The kids were great. Caufield scores, Guhle defends and also showed he can drive offense. Dach was a terrific pickup. Montembeault progressed, Xhekaj was a very pleasant surprise, Barron improved a lot and Harris was steady from the get-go. There were a lot of positives to the season from the kids.

We ran out the last year of several contracts. Drouin, Monahan, Byron and $3.5MM retained salary for Dadanov and Bonino come off the books. That's a total of $18.8MM.

All in all, pretty good and I haven't even mentioned the extra draft picks that Hughes managed, or the development of our draft picks from 2022 who played in the CHL and NCAA and SEL.

Yeah....better than expected.

[Boston_Habs]

I'm a bit more with Skilly. Maybe not worse than expected but not as good as I hoped other than maybe Caufield showing that he can be a 40-goal guy if he stays healthy.

Other than that still a lot of question marks in the context of building to a team that has several All Star if not a couple of elite level talents. My definition of an All Star is being legitimately considered among the top 25-30 forwards in the league, the top 16 dmen, and the top 5 goalies.

I'm with Skilly on Suzuki. I wanted to see a bigger jump from our best forward. 66 points, tied for 70th in the league. There were 30 forwards this year with >80 points. Nick's production was hampered by injuries to Caufield and playing with scrubs but 80 points is the floor next year for Suzuki.

I don't know what to make of the D corps. Mike Matheson is my favorite player back there, but question marks galore. They get points for development but still not sure I see a top pair guy among Guhle, Harris, Barron, Xhekaj.

If nothing else, I want to see HuGo clear more dead wood from the roster.

[frozone]

It's hard to settle on just one option, but I'll say worse than expected. The ultimate reason for that decision is that our winning record under St-Louis was better last season than it was this season. And I know that there are plenty of legitimate reasons why MSL's winning record is actually worse this year (injuries come to mind), but at the end of the day, I was expecting to at least be at par. And it just didn't happen.

I am definitely encouraged by the play of our youngsters, though. There is indeed a feeling that we are building something here, but I don't feel like we're particularly close to translating it into wins. As a result, this season had a little bit of an Ottawa Senators stench to it... our youngsters took strides and showed well which brought a feeling of optimism, but that feeling contrasted heavily with the awful record.

[franko]

Really, though, you can't hope to improve while wanting to tank.

[Willie Dog]

If HuGo can unload 'black hole' Hoffman and Joel 'I only do well in the playoffs' Armia then I'll be happier..

[Andrew]

For me it's slightly below expectations. Objectives for this season were:

1. Develop key young players: mostly a fail due to significant injuries
   
2. Add a 3rd first rounder at the deadline: fail due to injuries
3. Draft a difference maker: TBD (fingers crossed)
4. You could add a fourth, if we're looking at development of team identity & style in alignment with MSL's vision: unclear on progression there, but it appears to be positive

[PTH]

I'd say it's a partial success... a lot of kids got icetime, somethimes it wasn't the plan (specifically on D), but given how many got hurt and we ended up with a lineup of AHLers without much of a future, it isn't a great developmental year, but not a bad one.

The bigger issue is how we have a thin layer of NHL veterans above a large number of kids and career AHLers... and little to no star power.

Once thing this season made clear to me is how a team is basically defined by its top handful of players. We need to find more high-end talent. Filler can be called up from the AHL or grabbed off waivers, if we have no other options...

[seventeen]

One thing seems clear. We are all right. By that I mean everyone is correct in their assessment and judgment. They're rated differently because we all had different expectations. Mine was really low.....get that first overall pick if possible, but finish bottom 5 otherwise. Well, if you do that you have to expect that you are going to have a bad season, so winning was very low on my list, whereas it may have been much higher for others.

There were a lot of off-ice organizational successes, though. The development guys look good, we picked up another first round pick from a team that might not be very good in 2 years time. We shed Weber's salary, etc. etc.

[mikeg]

My heart wanted a full tank, something to solidify a bottom 3 pick. The kids and MSL just wouldn't let that happen. So it went worse than I expected.

Lots of reasons to be hopeful but just as many to be trepid about.

We have so much youth and depth on D, we will need to start moving pieces soon because there's a logjam and we have the benefit of having too much right now.

Cole's contract talks seem to be not heading in the long term direction but more short term, I don't like that.

People seem to like Monty. I am not one of them, I don't think he is a solution in nets and unfortunately we don't seem to have any solution there. I would really like to see them package one of our D prospects with a pick and go grab a goalie to match the youth on this team with more upside and pedigree.

We could end up as low as 7th in the draft, which is not exactly home run territory.

It's just all a little too meh for me, we were not good, but better than last year. We don't have anything like a generational talent in the system, and no hope (let's be real) of drafting one... so... meh.

[Habs_fan_in_LA]

Worse than expected. Not 32 this time but with all the promising youngsters playing in lieu of injured unmotivated veterans I expected better. Playoff teams need kids and veterans so trading everyone over 25 doesn’t create a good mix. Kids make positional mistakes but are seen hustling with good effort. Top teams have 3 outstanding superstars. 40 plus goal scorers. We have none. Balance of veterans and big guys and speedsters and hustlers and ajitators and characters and leaders and shooters. Improvement over a last place showing is not a big deal