For a relatively short time frame, it seemed that the Montreal Canadiens would somehow manage to avoid the choppy waters involved in a rebuild.
In a sense, the fact that Montreal had reached their fourth rebuilding season with almost no real controversy or hardship was far from entirely positive; it gave the impression that the team had breezed through one of the toughest challenges in professional sports.
But now, the rebuilding ship is taking on water, and the team is struggling to bail it out.
Rebuilding Realities
With the recall of Jacob Fowler, it’s clear that the organization believes the Montreal Canadiens should be in a playoff spot once the dust settles on the 2025-26 season, even though head coach Martin St-Louis insisted that Fowler’s promotion was simply a matter of evaluating his development.
Now that we’ve reached this point, it’s important to remember that the Canadiens barely qualified for the playoffs in 2024-25, and needed help from the laundry-list of teams chasing them in the standings just to receive the final invitation to the springtime dance.
It essentially erased the notion that rebuilds aren’t linear, a sentence we heard ad nauseam when the team first decided to rip things down to the studs.
It genuinely seemed like the Habs were the exception to the rule.
But now that they’re trending towards missing the playoffs, the delusions of grandeur have faded, and reality has settled in.
There is no such thing as a painless rebuild in the NHL.
And with that in mind, despite the encouraging results in the first few seasons of the rebuild, the team, the players, and the fans must adjust their expectations.
The Canadiens are not done rebuilding, and they’re still quite far away from having the type of lineup that could be considered a legitimate Stanley Cup contender.
This doesn’t erase the many positives, and it’s still fair to say Montreal is ahead of the usual rebuilding curve, but it does remind us that not only is the current valley of frustrating results common place in the NHL, it’s likely to be followed by even more valleys, amid a few peaks.
How long it takes for the Canadiens to forge their path through those peaks and valleys remains to be seen.
But they do have the foundation necessary to make it, eventually, if enough patience is added to the equation.
