Every year, the NHL Draft is a stage where eyes converge from all parts of the hockey universe. It is an opportunity for all teams of the biggest hockey league in the world to replenish their rosters with promising young talent. After shocking the hockey world by selecting Juraj Slafkovsky with the first pick last year, the Canadiens were once again at the centre of attention for this year’s Draft in Nashville. It was not a surprise that Connor Bedard (CHI), Leo Carlsson (ANA, a small surprise), Adam Fantilli (CBJ), and Will Smith (SJS) would be the first four players selected in the 2023 NHL Draft. At the 5th rank, it was a pure mystery. Up until the pick, there were rumors that the Nashville Predators, hosts of the event, would offer the moon to the Canadiens for the 5th selection. In this article, we will try to learn a little bit about who the new Hab is, and we will think about what this whole Draft week meant for the team.
The Chosen One
Last year, for his first NHL Draft, Kent Hughes ignored the player that was the most popular among the fans to select a late riser from Europe in the Slovakian winger Juraj Slafkovsky. Same story this season. Despite the loud appreciation of the fans for the Russian prospect Matvei Michkov, Hughes went off the boards by choosing the Austrian defenceman David Reinbacher. I think this article by my friend Thibaud Chatel has a lot of information on the new Hab, so I encourage you to read it. Thibaud has been tracking data from the NL (Switzerland) for a couple of times now and he might be the best person to talk about Reinbacher.
As I said earlier, Reinbacher is a late riser. Up until the 2021-22 season, he was on no one’s radar for the first round of the NHL Draft. But like Thibaud explain in his article, a series of fortunate circumstances lead the young Austrian to face challenges and overachieve himself overcoming those challenges. That’s how he went from a projected 3rd round pick to the #1 defenceman on his team. It is impressive considering the fact he plays in one of the top leagues in the world at only 17 years old.
Reinbacher is mobile, shoot-first defenceman who produced a lot of points for his age and his position. When I say he is a shoot-first player, trust me he is. He is not a puck-moving defenceman. When he has the puck in the offensive zone, he usually makes “the safe play” by blasting the puck forward hoping it goes in or a teammate picks up a rebound. Despite a surprising point total, he is not an offensive defenceman. He fits the mould of your Habs defenceman who can skate, shoot, do good defensively and hopefully play a role on a second unit of power play. His good performances in one of the best leagues in the world make him one of the best prospects of the 2023 NHL Draft. The Canadiens hope they can build off his solid start in a professional league to make him a top-pair defenceman in a near future.
What was once a huge strength of Montréal, the right side of the defence (with Subban, Weber, Petry), became a huge weakness after the captain Shea Weber was force to stop playing hockey due to injuries, and that Jeff Petry was traded for a lefty (Mike Matheson) … leaving David Savard as best righty (D) on the team. Before Marc Bergevin got fired, he tried to address this need by selecting Logan Mailloux in 2021. A couple of months later, Kent Hughes was trading Artruri Lehkonen for a promising RHD in Justin Barron. The handedness of Reinbacher made him a valuable prospect for the Canadiens organization.
I worked on TheDraftDigest, a project by Chace McCallum, Josh Khalfin and I where we basically built our own prospecting tools using EliteProspects.com data. Our model suggested Reinbacher was the best defenceman of the Draft and had him higher than the consensus. Relative to most public analytics model, Reinbacher makes sense at #5, but relative to the consensus, it looks like Kent Hughes outdid himself and made another reach with a top pick. Not all the stats brands were high on the Habs new protege. Private hockey intelligence company Stathletes had Reinbacher at #11 … behind another defenceman: Axel Sandin Pelikka.
What Habs do wrong?
Accelerating the rebuild with safer prospects
After a season and a half, Kent Hughes has shown his imprint on the team. In back-to-back drafts, he has traded picks for former really promising young centres (former 1st round picks) who struggled to get a top-6 role in their respective teams. Last year, the Canadiens made a big splash by trading Alex Romanov to acquire Kirby Dach from the Chicago Blackhawks. A season later, this bet is looking good for the Canadiens. Dach looks like a rejuvenated player under Martin St. Louis. His recent glow gave hope to the Canadiens who wish to apply the same magic to the recently acquired centre Alex Newhook. Newhook is a good player. He produced a lot of points everywhere he went and was projected to be a good top-6 C in the league. Last season, despite an Avalanche team riddled with injuries, the young talent could not find a regular role as a second centre of the team, the role that he lost to JT Compher. As a 3rd C on the Avs and with almost no good PP looks, he still managed to score 14 goals. Kent Hughes hopes that his former client gets blessed by the same MSL magic that touched Cole Caufield and Kirby Dach.
So here, we can see a small pattern: Bet on 20-year-olds who used to be really promising prospects. How good is this? The biggest advantage of this method is that the player’s floor will generally be high. Dach and Newhook both had NHL seasons under their belt before being traded and showed enough to not be worried to have to play in Europe in a near future. For both, the floor is “offensive 3rd liner that can help on the 2nd line,” which is a decent outcome. Since the team does not have to worry about wasting a prospect, they can focus on the ceiling of the player. This comes with a problem: betting on an older player is a safer bet because the player is less likely to “bust.” But the uncertainty also relies on the ceiling (or “upside”) of the player. Newhook and Dach have not shown star potential yet and they are extremely likely at this point to not be stars because their potential is about to plateau. This article about Thibaud Chatel explains really well this phenomenon about the certitude about a player’s potential relative to their age.
One thing we can conclude is that swinging for safe players is good on one hand because you are likely to get what you see. The backhanded side of this strategy is that you are not allowing space for surprising positive outcomes (stars).
The Newhook trade also raised concerns for me regarding the fact that I was pretty confident that some really good prospects that were overlooked in the first 30 picks would be available at the 31st selection. I am thinking that the possibility of finding a prospect with a more interesting profile than Newhook was real. My initial reaction to the trade was “Montreal paid a lot for him!” Giving the 31st and 37th selection as well as Gianni Fairbrother seemed a lot to me.
The summed estimated value of the 31st and 37th selections (orange) is roughly equal to the estimated value of the 23rd pick (in pink). In front of a situation, it is not out of pocket to ask if the current version of player that Alex Newhook is more valuable than the Draft picks. Personally, I believe that I would have preferred keeping the picks and selecting prospects instead of trading for him. I want to be clear when I say that I do not think that MTL lost a lot of value in this trade and therefore, I do not see the trade as a heartbreaking loss for the Canadiens. But I am not a fan of the trade although I am hoping I am proved wrong in the future.
Targeting the Wrong Needs
Kent Hughes said that if David Reinbacher was a left, there is a chance the team would have smaller interest in him. So it is clear that the team hopes to answer an immediate need with this selection. I am not here to bring back the debate about “Drafting for needs or not?” The Canadiens selected Reinbacher because they badly need a top right-handed defenceman because Shea Weber and Jeff Petry vanished after helping the team to reach the Stanley Cup Finals in 2021. From my assessment of the Canadiens, they have some more urgent needs than the RHD position. Montréal deeply lacks high-end offensive talent in the forward group. Honestly, with all the respect due to the players, if you team’s best forward is Nick Suzuki, do not expect to be a contending team anytime soon. Caufield, Suzuki, Dach are nice pieces to have around in the forward group. They are not bad players by any means. But this team needs game breakers. They need elite talent. I thought Matvei Michkov was part of the answer to that need. He has been producing points at an historic pace, and his most recent performances made him one of the top prospects in our records. He is just a pure offensive talent: extremely good with the puck on his stick and he has an extra sense to make some exciting offensive plays. I think Montreal needs that type of player as soon as possible to hope to build a winning culture. Even if they missed with the Drouin trade, they need to try again.
I also think that the team needs to go a little bit more for pure offensive defencemen. The Canadiens like their players to have a particular type. Their defencemen are big and can skate. Their forwards generally work hard. In my opinion, the Canadiens should open their doors new type of players like more Lane Hutson’s. On the power play, you can be big and skate, but you want the QB to be able to distribute the puck like he is a forward. It partially explains Drouin’s success on PP with the Canadiens … until Mike Matheson decided to show how it is done when he came back from injuries. Matheson was the best player of the Canadiens last season. His mobility, his hands and his ability to always take the right risks made him one of the best defencemen of the NHL last season. In today’s NHL, you need to have D’s who can jump on the plays like Shea Theodore. But there is a lot of hope that Lane Hutson becomes that defenceman who makes highlight plays on a nightly basis. It is also not impossible Reinbacher keeps his rocket rise and develops his offensive abilities in the upcoming seasons and eventually become the #1 D Habs scouts saw in him.
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In conclusion, for a nth straight year, the Canadiens bet on a player that is not the favourite among the fanbase. This time, it is different from last year. It was a big risk to select Slafkovsky (according to our model) with the 1st overall pick while we can see a much safer bet in the selection of David Reinbacher at #5. One element that I need to add at this point is that Reinbacher is not your usual defensive defenceman who plays extra-safe. Despite being in a men’s league, he had the habit to carry the puck at a surprising rate. This level of confidence is rare for a player of his age playing pro. I do not think he will be an offensive dynamo in the NHL, but we need to not exclude the possibility that his offence translates to the NHL at some point and improves. As for the Canadiens, they will eventually need to get some offensive help. We saw on the 2nd day of the Draft that betting on young talented offensive players was not necessarily a priority since they loaded the prospect pool with overagers, goaltenders and the little brother of Arber. Like Vegas is showing every year, it is not impossible to trade for stars or sign them as UFAs, but … it is definitely easier and less expensive to select them at the Draft.
Thanks for your work writing this up. I appreciate the explanation of how and why your model ranks DR higher than most public scouting services. I would like to address what I believe to be an errant logic in the following statement. I have seen others make the same leap, but I don’t think the conclusion follows. You write: “Kent Hughes said that if David Reinbacher was a left, there is a chance the team would have smaller interest in him. So it is clear that the team hopes to answer an immediate need with this selection.” Hughes comment only states that they would possibly exclude if he played a position of abundance. It does not follow that they are drafting for need, only that they MIGHT not draft if it was a position in which their cup runneth over. KH did not say that he rose on their list because he is a right-shot defence-man. If anything the logic should lead us to conclude that what KH was saying was that they viewed DR as the best player available. We might infer from KH’s qualification that it may have been close between 5 and 6 on their list. But we cannot logically conclude from KH’s statement that they drafted for need.