Engels Rejects the Rumors About Laine
Eric Engels appeared on The Sick Podcast earlier this week and the Habs insider doesn’t buy the rumors linking Patrik Laine to the Montreal Canadiens.
The dog days of Summer are rumor mongers’ bread and butter. They love this time of the year as fans are hockey starved and will read just about anything. Whenever a top-six player becomes available, there are rumors about the Montreal Canadiens being among the interested teams.
Earlier this week, Eric Engels and Tony Marinaro discussed the Patrik Laine case and while the Canadiens insider didn’t completely rule out the possibility of Kent Hughes acquiring the big Finn, he considers it unlikely.
I fully agree with Engels’ take as I’ve written about three weeks ago. I struggle to see how Hughes could bring him aboard. When Laine entered the NHL/NHLPA Player Assistance Program, he made it clear he needed to focus on his mental health. Now that he’s out of the program, I’m not sure landing in town would be the best for him.
Nov 29, 2023; Columbus, Ohio, USA; Columbus Blue Jackets right wing Patrik Laine (29) skates against the Montreal Canadiens in the first period at Nationwide Arena. Mandatory Credit: Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports
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Montreal is as pressurized a market as there is and in recent years, we’ve seen Jonathan Drouin join the program because of mental health issues and Carey Price used it as well, saying he had let himself get to a very dark place mentally. Does that sound like a place Laine should want to come to? Cool as a cucumber goaltender Price struggled mentally in this market. It just doesn’t seem like a risk Hughes would be interested in taking and neither should Laine really.
Perhaps if that was the sole issue, Hughes would roll the dice, but considering Laine has also regressed over the course of his career and he’s now asked to be traded twice, there are red flags there and important ones at that. I’m as much against this move as I was against the idea of selling the farm to get Pierre-Luc Dubois.
Furthermore, Hughes has put a healthy salary structure in place in Montreal and would throwing $8.7 million to a player who is, at this time, a question mark make sense? The man has only got two years left on his contract and then he can walk away as a UFA. Of course, Montreal could try to extend him, but if he fails to show much in the next two years, how much money could the GM throw at him without losing the room?
He’s got players buying what he’s selling over there. Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky both accepted less money than Suzuki because he’s the team’s top forward right now. What kind of message would it send to those players to be willing to give the disgruntled forward nearly nine million a year?
In the next two years, I believe it would make much more sense to see what Canadiens prospects like Joshua Roy and Ivan Demidov can bring to the table. Hughes has been clear about the fact he wouldn’t make moves that would hinder his youngsters’ development and that, whether we like it or not, could be such a move.
