How Canadiens’ culture, former teammate Martin St. Louis led to Chris Kreider signing
LAVAL-SUR-LE-LAC, Que. — Exactly one week before the Montreal Canadiens made Chris Kreider the newest member of the team, general manager Kent Hughes was on a golf course.
But he was still working.
He had Anaheim Ducks general manager Pat Verbeek on the phone, discussing what would happen with Kreider, hoping for a trade because it was clear Kreider could be squeezed out by Anaheim’s salary cap constraints.
“I hit my best ball while talking to him at the same time,” Hughes said Monday at the Canadiens’ season-opening golf tournament. “Maybe my only one.”
That was on Sept. 5, and Hughes left that conversation under the impression a trade would be possible. Instead, the Ducks and Kreider mutually agreed to terminate his contract, and once he cleared the necessary waiver process to do that — with Kreider’s agent warning teams not to claim him because he wouldn’t report to their training camp, according to The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun — the Canadiens were immediately all in on Kreider.
On Saturday, a week after Hughes’ phone call, the Canadiens announced that they signed Kreider to a one-year contract worth $2.15 million, with bonuses that could make the deal worth up to $5.4 million.
“Montreal was pretty aggressive, so we only really got into term and numbers with Montreal,” Kreider said. “I’d rather not get into the terms and numbers discussed with other teams just out of respect. But Montreal, Gorts and Kent, they were pretty aggressive, so it moved pretty quick.”
“Gorts,” of course, is Canadiens president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton, who was Kreider’s general manager with the New York Rangers. But as aggressive as the Canadiens were with Kreider, the fact that he didn’t really speak to any other teams illustrates how attractive a destination Montreal has become.
That is perhaps the most important element of the Kreider signing: What he saw on his TV during last year’s playoffs made the Canadiens a destination for a player with a ton of postseason experience, but who has never won the Stanley Cup.
He obviously thinks he has a chance to do that in Montreal, and for a team just four years into a rebuild, there can’t be a much better endorsement of just how well that process is going.
“The skill, the speed, especially watching them in the playoffs as well, how connected (they are),” Kreider said. “As well, I think the pack mentality, a really tight group. You could tell it was a team … I think that’s a special thing, that’s a hard thing to create and that’s something they’ve cultivated here.”
A year ago, defenceman Noah Dobson talked about how he viewed the culture and tight-knit nature of the Canadiens from the outside, and how that was a big draw for him to sign an eight-year contract in a sign-and-trade with the New York Islanders. Now, Kreider is essentially saying the same thing.
That means something, and is perhaps more important than the opportunity to win that the Canadiens provide him.
It was also appropriate that Kreider’s first day addressing his new fans in Montreal — fans who have spent a dozen years booing him every time he’s played at the Bell Centre — came on the same day a new four-year contract was announced for head coach Martin St. Louis.
Because he, too, was a big draw for Kreider.
Kreider becomes the first former teammate St. Louis will coach. The two played on the same line for the Rangers for St. Louis’ final season and a half in the NHL. Kreider recounted how, the year before St. Louis took the job with the Canadiens on Feb. 9, 2022, he reached out to St. Louis to work with him individually. The two of them went over video and got on the ice in the offseason, and Kreider scored a career-high 52 goals the following season.
“For me, having been lucky enough to play with him in New York, even back then, he was almost like a player-coach,” Kreider said. “The intensity, the tenacity and the discipline, the things that he brought to the rink every day, I don’t think that I can say that I’ve learned more from any one individual than the time I spent playing with him on his line. Super wise, incredibly smart, even back then I knew he’d be a great coach.”
As the Canadiens work to ascend to a level where they are considered a Stanley Cup contender year after year, they will need to attract players to join the core that has been cultivated over Gorton and Hughes’ time in Montreal. The culture players can see from the outside is an important factor in that ability to attract players, as is the allure of playing for someone like St. Louis, who is now armed with a four-year contract that gives him the mandate to achieve that goal of consistent contender status.
Gorton said on his first day on the job nearly five years ago that he wanted to make Montreal a destination again. The Kreider signing is further proof that goal is coming into focus.
“I think everybody here knows our team is in a good spot,” Gorton said. “We have really good players, we have a nice future, and it’s Montreal, it’s Original Six, it’s a team with so much history. I think it’s nice to know that players around the league are recognizing that. They come in and see what it’s like on game day for us. To be in that building, to see what it’s like, it makes us all feel pretty good about where we’re at.”
Guhle injury update
Defenceman Kaiden Guhle was vague at the end of last season on the state of his health through the playoffs, and in all the summer skates that have been going on at the team’s practice facility in Brossard for the last month, he has been conspicuously absent.
Guhle did have a procedure over the summer and will need some time to complete his recovery, said a team source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to publicly discuss the injury. The length of Guhle’s absence is not quite clear, but it is possible that his recovery time could spill into the start of the season.
Guhle was given the option of simply rehabbing the injury, but the decision was made to get it taken care of. If he has to miss the start of the season as a result, that would be a small price to pay to have him back fully healthy and without that lingering concern. If he does miss the start of the season, the source said, it should not be more than a few games.
The Canadiens have a lot of depth on the blue line, which made that decision easier to make. Defenceman Arber Xhekaj remains unsigned, but Gorton said Monday he was confident something would get done in time for Xhekaj to join his teammates on the ice Thursday, and The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun reported a contract could be imminent.
The logic of the term
Zack Bolduc signing a four-year contract on Friday was immediately overshadowed by Kreider’s own signing, but it was an interesting piece of business for the Canadiens. The term on that deal walks Bolduc straight to unrestricted free agency at the end of it, which is something teams tried to avoid in the past.
But Hughes said Monday that may be a concern of the past with the changing landscape of the NHL market.
“That, to me, I don’t want to say it’s outdated as a concept, but we offered him different terms, including four (years). It wasn’t something that was a sticking point for us,” Hughes said. “I think we’re in a league where players, if they don’t want to be in a certain place, ask to be traded with term left on their deals and they’re gone. If we signed him for five years, he’d be going to free agency anyways.
“And I think if you walk a player to arbitration on the door of free agency, I’m not convinced — and we’ll see how the market evolves here — but is arbitration always going to be the best vehicle for determining a player’s value? I would rather let the open market make that determination.”
The Canadiens are betting that Bolduc will be a good value contract at $4.2 million over the back half of his four-year contract, and that the same culture and possibility of winning that attracted Dobson and Kreider will be a similar draw for Bolduc to stick around when the time comes.
Elephant in the room
Of course, the reason for Kreider’s booing in Montreal for a dozen years had to come up Monday.
Back in 2014, when Kreider was playing with St. Louis on the Rangers against the Canadiens in the Eastern Conference final, Kreider was breaking in on goal at full speed when he was tripped by Alexei Emelin and went slamming into Carey Price, knocking Price out of the series and effectively thwarting the Canadiens’ best chance at a Stanley Cup since they last won in 1993.
A lot of time has passed since, but many Canadiens fans have not forgotten.
“It’s a passionate fanbase; they’ve got long memories,” Kreider said. “Either way, I’m going to go out there and work as hard as I can and do whatever it takes to win hockey games.”
As Kreider has done ever since that day in 2014, he once again insisted he had no intention of slamming into Price.
“I was just a young kid, pretty bad skater at the time, trying to score a goal,” he said.
When he was asked by Guillaume Lefrancois of La Presse if he had been contacted by Price since signing with the Canadiens, Kreider chuckled and said no. He was asked a follow-up question about whether he’s had any contact with Price over the past dozen years.
“No,” Kreider said, “I haven’t bumped into him.”
Then everyone realized just how funny that turn of phrase was for this particular situation.
