MONTREAL — If this was an easy deal, it wouldn’t have taken so long to close.
And if it had taken much longer, the likelihood of us doing it at all before the season would have dwindled by the second.
Those should be the main considerations in evaluating the trade Montreal Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes made on Saturday, because it’s far from perfect for his team.
Moving Jeff Petry and former first-round pick Ryan Pauling to the Pittsburgh Penguins for Montreal native Mike Mathison and a 2023 fourth-round pick didn’t accomplish Hughes’ primary goal, which he said multiple times was to get long-term flexibility at the pick for the Canadiens in honor of Petrie’s trade request made earlier this year.
Matheson, who had a career season after two that fell well short of expectations, has a cap hit of $4.875 million for each of the next four seasons, while Petrie is set to make $6.25 million for each of the next three. And while it’s fair to assume that Poehling, who will make $750,000 this coming season, will likely top just over $2 million if he continues to progress, it’s fair to say that this deal was a failure on the most important front for Canadiens — especially without considering the nuance that the deal is very difficult to pull off.
But this nuance cannot be ignored.
And that’s not much of a deal for Montreal by any stretch of the imagination.
The short-term cap flexibility Hughes received in the trade was at least used to get Rem Pitlik to sign what will likely be a steal of a deal, and that’s a plus. The player, who recorded nine goals and 26 points in 46 games with the Canadiens last season after scoring six goals and 13 points in 31 previous NHL games, was arbitration-eligible and could have been able to take out an award of more than $3 million on season based on a worryingly small sample size, and Hughes was able to sign him for the net average salary of $1.1 million on a two-year contract.
That doesn’t mitigate the fact that the Petrie trade represented as good an opportunity as Hughes will have in the short term to clear a significant chunk of change from Montreal’s cap down the line, and now that opportunity has been lost. That doesn’t change the fact that Hughes needs to devote much of his time and energy in the coming weeks, months and years to creating the cap space he’ll need to fill out the roster he wants to have three seasons from now.
But, again, it was a tough deal to make.
It was also impossible to win.
Petrie, who was in the process of producing the worst of his eight seasons as a Montreal Canadiens and was doing so in the first year of a new four-year, $25 million deal that would not expire until after his 37th birthday, asked to be transferred for family reasons in January. Given his unrecognizable play from the one that got him the deal in the first place, there was no way we could trade him before the NHL trade deadline in March without essentially giving him away for nothing or taking back something unwanted and early of the offseason, it looked as if Petrie’s resurgence since mid-February had done nothing to change that dynamic.
Hughes said moments after the trade with Pittsburgh was completed that he was able to keep Petrie hoping he would show his best and hoped a better deal would come along, but added he didn’t want to risk losing the deal on the table for the flip side of that scenario, having already seen what could be the worst of Petrie in the first few months of last season. Knowing that Petrie would be returning to Montreal without his wife and four children definitely made Hughes think the risk was more than he was comfortable with, so he accepted the trade with Pittsburgh.
Despite missing out on what was believed to be a key goal for the Canadiens in fulfilling Petrie’s request, Hughes did get more than his money’s worth to sign Pitlick.
“In any trade that we would have considered with Pittsburgh or any other team involving Jeff Petry, one of the items that either had to come in the deal or we had to be able to acquire afterward was a quarterback. We weren’t prepared to go into next season with (only) two defensemen who had played full-time or (had) extensive NHL experience, so we wanted to do that.
Mathison, 28, has played 417 games in this league and 20 more in the Stanley Cup playoffs. He was represented by Hughes for years before Hughes moved from player-agent to GM of the Canadiens, and he fills a need.
“Matheson is a point guard who played the first four minutes in Pittsburgh that brings a lot of the qualities that we’re losing in Jeff Petrie in terms of his ability to carry the puck,” Hughes said. “I think if you look, we were checking yesterday, I think Mike was in the 90th percentile for goals in the National Hockey League 5-on-5 in 60 minutes, I think he was in the 85th percentile for points. I don’t know where he sat, but he had five game-winning goals and almost all of his offensive production was at even strength.
“I also know him as an individual. I feel really comfortable that Mike is the guy in our locker room, at this point in his career, that can help our younger players — whether it’s draft picks like (first pick in 2022) Juraj Slafkowski or our young defensemen trying to make their way as regular NHL players. I think Mike is a five-star guy who can be a great asset to our club and help our young players.”
The Canadiens weren’t getting that in other trades Hughes discussed with Petrie’s suitors.
He believed he would have to keep his salary on Petrie’s deal to watch him play for another team — something Hughes was adamant he would not do, as it would negate the only benefit of trading Petry, without to get a player who can play a similar role — and seeing nothing that would give the Canadiens what they needed to live with granting Petrie’s request at this point.
This trade was a reasonable decision, with Poehling at the bottom end of the Canadiens depth chart, which improved at his position (center) and pushed him back to the fringes, and with the money freed up to bring back Pitlick for a good deal.
Whether or not the Pittsburgh deal is good for Montreal will be determined by Petrie’s performance in Pittsburgh and Mathison’s ability to build on his 11-goal, 31-point season with Pittsburgh to prove he can be the player that believed when Dale Tallon gave him an eight-year, $39 million contract with the Florida Panthers in October 2017.
Hughes is optimistic that the environment created by Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis is conducive to that happening.
“I think that’s always a factor,” Hughes said. “I suppose if we just do a straight trade and hope that the player we send performs at the level he performed with us before we send him to a new team and vice versa, I think we’d be crazy to think that we just know a hockey player better than any other team. In Mike’s case in particular, it’s not just about the player, it’s the individual, and it’s going to be an environment that works for Mike and allows him to play to his potential.
“The potential – no one disputes it. There’s a reason he was drafted in the first round, there’s a reason he signed an eight-year deal when he was in Florida after one full season in the NHL. And Marty, in our opinion… You know, Brendan Gallagher told me that one of the things that he thought was very unique about Marty was that he felt like he was coached as an individual; not individually within the system, but simply as a hockey player.
“And yes, we believe that Marty and our group will help these guys. And it’s not just on the ice, it’s the environment in which they perform and how we get them involved, protect them and make them feel comfortable playing at their best.”
St. Louis and the Canadiens’ new regime helped Petrie do it when it looked like it might never happen again. They helped Pitlick almost get out of Montreal and helped several others play well beyond their potential as they relegated the Canadiens to the bottom of the standings.
So it’s not unreasonable for Hughes, who knows Matheson as well (if not better than) any GM who could acquire him, to feel encouraged that this will end well.
If there was anything better to do in the last few months, it would have been done by now. A better deal was unlikely to come together as the remaining money in the system was spent filling out rosters before training camps opened.
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