MONTREAL — Every year, NHL training camp can essentially be divided into two phases, and it’s important to remember that the first phase carries much different meaning to different people than the second phase.
Montreal Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis provided a perfect encapsulation of that difference Tuesday after his team beat the New Jersey Devils 3-0 in their second game of the preseason, two shutout wins on consecutive nights.
“I would say early on you’re really focusing on the youth and to see where the guys are at, if they’re ready, and maybe seeing things they need to work on to get to the next step in their career,” St. Louis said. “And the more you get deeper into camp, I think you really start focusing on the core guys, your team, and especially things like the power play.
“But early on, the veterans, they just want to get some reps. They’re not as excited to play in an exhibition game as a young guy.”
This is important context in evaluating where things stand for the Canadiens after two preseason games, because the reality is the real work has not begun. And though it is exciting to see players such as Oliver Kapanen, Owen Beck, Filip Mesar and others excel at this stage of training camp, the bar is high at this point for their performance to move the needle in terms of what the team is planning for the start of the regular season. Because players who have provided a database of information in a far different context get a lot of benefit of the doubt.
Take, for instance, Michael Pezzetta, who is always acutely aware of his status as an NHL player, teetering on the edge of being an AHL player every day. The Canadiens have valued him enough over the past two years that they were unwilling to lose him on waivers for nothing, so he has been on the roster for the past two seasons. As a result, St. Louis has a database on him that he does not have on, say, Kapanen, and therefore Pezzetta gets a good degree of benefit of the doubt.
“I think Pezz comes to the rink every day to fight for his job — that’s his mentality,” St. Louis said. “And you know exactly what you’re going to get; he shows up, every time. So this is not a foreign environment for him.”
The reality St. Louis described of his veterans is true of every team’s veterans, and the resulting level of play in these early preseason games impacts how reliable the information you are gathering can be when it comes to projecting that information into the regular season.
These are not, consequently, NHL games, and this is not NHL competition, and making development decisions based on what you are seeing in this environment is not an intelligent way of going about things. We saw it when Jesperi Kotkaniemi stood out throughout the NHL preseason and made the Canadiens out of training camp in 2018, a decision that seemed sound and deserved at the time but in hindsight was probably not the right one for his development.
That’s not to say the information gathered in this phase of camp is useless, because it can help determine who will get to demonstrate their NHL readiness in the second phase of camp, when the competition gets heightened and moves closer to NHL regular-season standards. And if those players perform in that phase of camp, it provides an entirely different set of information that can be viewed within a context that is closer to NHL reality.
This preamble is most necessary when it comes to discussing young centres Kapanen and Beck, each of whom has done everything in his power to make decisions difficult for the Canadiens through their first two preseason games.
It would be impossible not to link these players together because it is easy to see a future where they are fighting for the same job. And it could be argued they are fighting for that job right now.
They are both right-shot, two-way centres who can win faceoffs and have shown well thus far in camp, but the reality is there is a right-shot, two-way centre who can win faceoffs and is standing in their way: Jake Evans. And like Pezzetta, Evans will benefit from the databank of NHL-level information he has already provided to the coaching staff and management.
Kapanen won eight of his 14 faceoffs Monday night against the Philadelphia Flyers and produced two assists, looking dangerous all over the ice, showing an excellent stick and remarkable positioning for a player who is accustomed to the international ice surface, which speaks to his high hockey IQ. Beck won five of his nine faceoffs against the Devils on Tuesday and got an assist when he broke up a play just inside the Montreal blue line with the New Jersey goaltender pulled to allow Pezzetta to score on the empty net and ice the game.
Un but dans un filet désert, parce que pourquoi pas!
Empty-net goal, because why not!
NJD 0, MTL 3#GoHabsGo pic.twitter.com/7T5iHBt4sT
— Canadiens Montréal (@CanadiensMTL) September 25, 2024
Right now, both players look like a potential upgrade on Evans or Christian Dvorak, but it’s not that simple. Kapanen has played two years of professional hockey in his native Finland and put up 14 points in 13 playoff games for KalPa Kuopio last season before excelling at the world championships for the senior national team. But he is set to move to the SHL in Sweden and play for Timrå this season if he does not crack the Canadiens out of camp, so sending him to Laval is not an option. Beck is set to play his first season of professional hockey.
From a development standpoint and an asset management standpoint, having Kapanen play in Timrå and having Beck play in Laval makes a ton of sense, no matter what it might look like right now. Not all NHL decisions are necessarily merit-based. Asset management comes into play, especially when the Canadiens are nowhere near a finished product. Evans and Dvorak are in the final seasons of their contracts. Putting one of them on waivers to make room for Kapanen or Beck doesn’t make a lot of sense either unless one of them forces the Canadiens’ hand.
There is precedent for the Canadiens to make a move like this because they put Joel Armia on waivers at the end of training camp last season and sent him to Laval when he cleared. They would have the same option with Dvorak because his $4.45 million contract, like Armia’s $3.4 million contract, makes it highly likely he would clear waivers, which is not necessarily the case with Evans and his $1.7 million contract.
So, should the Canadiens move Dvorak to make room for Kapanen or Beck? That would give them four right-shot centres, with Alex Newhook as the only left-shot faceoff option, someone who won 46.5 percent of his draws last season, though he improved in that area as the season went along (he was at 50.3 percent over his final 28 games).
It would not be an ideal situation.
Then there’s Pezzetta, who is looking like he will begin the season as the 13th forward. Perhaps there’s an argument to be made that Kapanen should fill that spot to allow the Canadiens to keep him and not send him back to Sweden, at least not right away. Except that scenario has Kapanen sitting in the stands, getting spot duty and not getting the proper development time when the alternative is to send him to a league that is better than the one he played in last season and will allow him to grow.
Training camp is far from over, and there is still ample time for Kapanen and Beck to change the calculus of this decision by making themselves indispensable. But that bar is extremely high when you consider all the factors involved, the most important one being the lack of a need to rush this with Kapanen or Beck.
The best way to look at how they have performed so far in camp is the Canadiens have two promising centres in their pipeline, and at this time next year, Kapanen and Beck will likely have a much clearer path to an NHL job at a time when the Canadiens will be better prepared to receive them.
