Ahead of schedule, and priced like it

Three Octobers ago, the Canadiens were a rebuild with a fun first line. Last spring they were one round from the Stanley Cup Final, with a 25-year-old goalie who had played 16 NHL games the season before in net for all 19 playoff games. The standings arc is the kind that sells season tickets: 55 points, then 68, 76, 91 and finally 106.

That arc raises the first question a bettor has to answer: how much of last season will repeat? Every team's record mixes two things. One is how well it actually played, measured by the quality of chances it created and allowed. The other is the part that tends not to carry over, like a hot shooting season or a goalie stopping more than he should. Montreal had plenty of both.

By our count, about 99 of the 106 points reflected how well the team played. The other seven came from finishing and goaltending that we do not expect to repeat. Add a year of growth for the league's youngest core and Montreal is still a top-six club on paper.

That makes us a little cooler than the crowd. Montreal is the trendy pick this fall: eight NHL.com staffers have the Canadiens winning the Atlantic, and a few already see a parade. We have them fourth in the division, a hair behind Florida, a very good team in a crowded race. The summer talk has circled the same three questions: can Dobes do it again, who centers the second line, and is this team big enough for spring? Our short answers. Dobes was good and also a bit lucky, so expect a solid starter rather than last March's version. The second-line center job is still open, and it is the lineup's soft spot. And the team is bigger than you think: Kreider, Slafkovsky and rookie Florian Xhekaj bring weight up front, and the blue line has plenty of it. This group can go deep in the spring, even if we would not call it the Cup favorite yet.

1What last season really was

Montreal finished sixth in points but around the middle of the league in the stats that best predict next season.

Two details soften the "lucky" label. Montreal has finished above its expected goals in each of the last five seasons, which points to real shooting talent, mostly Cole Caufield (51 goals on 33.7 expected). And the common expected-goals models underrate the settled, set-up shot this team lives on. Once we correct for that, Montreal looks better than the public numbers say.

2How the model builds Montreal's ranking

Our preseason rating starts from how well a team actually played last season, with luck stripped out, and then adds only what has historically carried over from one season to the next. Everything is tested on seasons the model did not see.

The starting point is solid but not elite. Measured on chances rather than results, Montreal was an above-average team last season, a step below its standings finish.

Youth is the biggest push upward. Demidov is 20, Hutson and Slafkovsky 22, Caufield 25. Across 18 years of data, the league's youngest teams improve the following season and the oldest decline, by about three and a half standings points between the extremes. Montreal is the youngest team in the league, and this is the part of its case the model believes most.

The finishing is partly real. Shooting and goaltending that hold up over three seasons earn a modest bonus. Montreal's five-year record of beating its expected goals qualifies.

The roster is almost unchanged. Over 93% of the projected lineup's ice time goes to players who were Canadiens last season. The summer brought one significant addition and no real losses. Kaiden Guhle misses the first couple of weeks after offseason surgery, a small early cost.

Summer moves: in and out

Net: Montreal added a top-six forward and lost no one it relied on. The core that reached the conference final is intact, and it is a year older in the good sense.

Two in-season additions also count for more this time. Phillip Danault (acquired from Los Angeles in December) and Alexandre Texier (from St. Louis in November) played only about half of last season in Montreal. A full season of Danault as a defensive third-line center and penalty killer, plus Texier's depth on the wing, makes this lineup stronger than the one Montreal used across last season as a whole.

Goalies and coach barely move it. Dobes gets more of the net than last season's mix, a small plus. The coach is unchanged, so there is nothing to adjust.

The result is a B- team, eighth in the league, projected for about 98 points over the new 84-game schedule. The seven teams ahead of Montreal: Colorado, Carolina, Tampa Bay, Ottawa, Dallas, Vegas and Florida. Minnesota is right behind.

Our projected opening-night lineup. Each player shows his 2026-27 grade (A to E, with a 0-100 score: his percentile among NHL regulars at his position), his role and last season's numbers. Goalies are graded the same way against the league's 64 starters and backups.

Reading the lineup

The top line is elite and now has a veteran finisher. Suzuki's 101 points and the Selke Trophy as the league's best defensive forward put him among the league's top forwards by our grades, and Caufield's 51 goals led the club by 21. Every one of them came with a goalie in net, the most in the league, and he finished two behind MacKinnon in the Rocket Richard race. Caufield is a true sniper: he beats goalies clean from spots most shooters only pass from, and he is a real threat to win the goal crown. Kreider, 35, arrives from Anaheim as a B- sniper and anchors the second power play. Age is the obvious risk, but a young room also gains from a player with more than a decade in the NHL and a Stanley Cup Final behind him.

Second-line center is the open question, and the most talked-about hole on the roster this fall. Oliver Kapanen scored 22 goals as a rookie, much of it from smart positioning around the net, but his all-around numbers were modest and he scored four goals in his final 25 games. He is a two-way center still early in his career, asked to play a big role very young; he would fit more naturally as a third or fourth-line center. That line works because Slafkovsky and Demidov drive it. Kapanen has taken swift strides in development over the last two to three years, so expect improvement from him. A healthy Kirby Dach is the other option.

Danault anchors a real checking group. With Danault centering the third line and Evans the fourth, Montreal has two proven defensive centers for penalty kills and late-game faceoffs, which keeps the kids' minutes offensive.

The blue line is Hutson plus a lot of minutes. Hutson (A+), a popular Norris finalist pick, is the best player on the team by our grades and pairs with Dobson, a genuine top-pair B. After that it is Matheson's heavy minutes at a C+ level, Carrier's shutdown work, and a third pair that grades in the D to E range. When Guhle returns in mid-October, the defense gets noticeably deeper. Until then, rookie Adam Engström is the first call as the seventh defenseman.

Reinbacher is the next wave, not the answer yet. The 2023 fifth overall pick had a strong camp, especially in his own zone, which was the weakness a year ago. Montreal still sent him to Laval to play big minutes and keep developing. Expect him to be the first recall if injuries hit the right side.

4Who matters most

Ask a fan which absence would hurt Montreal most and the answer is Suzuki or Caufield. Our absence research, built on thousands of games where regulars did not dress, points somewhere else. A defenseman who plays 24 minutes hands all 24 to someone worse, while a star forward's 19 minutes are spread across a deeper group. That makes Montreal's top-four defensemen more important to the nightly price than their name value suggests, and Lane Hutson the single most important player on the roster.

The market does not always see it that way. Prices tend to move for star forwards and much less for defensemen. For bettors, that makes Montreal's defensive lineup the first thing to check on game day.

5Goaltending: the crease that made the season

The season turned in net. Montreal's goaltending was four goals below expected over the first 41 games and 26 above expected over the last 41. Dobes took the job from Samuel Montembeault, started every playoff game, and signed a three-year extension on July 2.

The usual reading is that Montreal found a starter and Montembeault lost his game, and most previews name Dobes as the player under the most pressure this season. Fewer mention that the goalie behind him is better than his numbers say. Our analysis says the gap between the two is small, which also means the stakes are lower than the coverage suggests. Look at the months:

Take out one month each and the two veterans of last season look like the same goalie. Montembeault's five October starts account for more than his whole season's deficit; the rest of his year was slightly positive. Dobes's season total is almost entirely one hot March. Outside of it he was close to average. Montembeault was also +24.6 goals saved above expected the season before.

Our projection is deliberately cautious. Goalies repeat poorly from season to season, so we weigh three seasons, pull everyone toward average and apply an age curve. Dobes grades B+, a solidly above-average starter rather than the March version. Montembeault grades C+ and Fowler C, mostly because 17 games tell us little. Despite how the position is usually covered, a Dobes night off changes our price only slightly. The expected step back from last season's goaltending is already accounted for in Montreal's ranking.

The backup question is settled for now. Montembeault won the job with a sharp preseason (.971 save percentage in three games), and Fowler went to Laval to carry a starter's workload. Montembeault is in the last year of his contract, so a trade stays possible, and Fowler is one call away. Either way, our view of Montreal barely moves.

6Montreal's system: how they score and defend

Martin St. Louis enters his sixth season behind the bench, and his teams have a clear statistical fingerprint. Montreal does not win the shot count, and it does not need to. It scores off set plays and shooters who beat goalies clean, and it defends by collapsing to the slot, blocking shots and letting opponents shoot from the outside.

Offense: patience and shooters. No team took a larger share of its shots from settled possession, and few scored less often off rebounds or from the crease. Montreal's goals come from set-up plays and shots from beyond the crease, finished at an elite rate by Caufield in particular. This is exactly the kind of shot that public expected-goals models underrate, which is why Montreal keeps "outperforming" them.

Defense: bend around the slot. Opponents got to the inside and to second chances more than most, but Montreal's goalies and shot-blockers kept rebound goals remarkably low. That is the combination most likely to slip if the goaltending cools. The penalty kill is the soft spot: more than a quarter of the goals against came shorthanded.

Montreal's shots against are one of the most quoted numbers about this team (18th per game last season), usually as a warning. Read them with the system in mind. A team that concedes shots from the outside and blocks them will run a shot-share deficit most nights; it does not mean the team is losing the game. We do not find that St. Louis adds or subtracts wins beyond his roster, and with a young group, part of his record covers the rebuild years.

What it means for scoring. Montreal's games averaged 6.46 total goals last season: 3.40 for and 3.06 against per game, against a league average of 3.08 per team (6.16 per game). Our team scoring ratings carry that into 2026-27: Montreal projects as a top-ten offense and a bottom-half defense, which makes its games some of the higher-scoring matchups on the schedule.

7Special teams

On a per-minute basis, both units were middle of the pack. The power play still produced 51 goals at five-on-four, seventh most in the league, because Montreal drew plenty of penalties and its top unit rarely left the ice. The penalty kill leaned on a small group of defenders and on the goalies behind them.

How the power play works. Everything runs through Suzuki. He had the second-most power-play points in the league and set up more five-on-four goals directly than almost anyone. Hutson moves the puck from the top, Caufield waits for the one-timer, and Slafkovsky does the dirty work in the middle and around the crease, where he scored 14 times. Demidov gives the unit a second passer who can hold the puck on the flank. It is a unit built to make the goalie move before anyone shoots, which fits a team that scores off settled possession at even strength too.

Kreider changes the second unit, and maybe the first. Last season the second group was an afterthought. Kreider has made a career of screens, tips and rebounds on the power play, and he gives Montreal a net-front finisher who does not need the top unit's puck skill to score. He could just as easily push for a spot on the first unit. The likeliest setup splits the two net-front forwards, Slafkovsky on one unit and Kreider on the other, so both groups have someone living in front of the goalie.

How the penalty kill works. It mirrors the five-on-five system: collapse to the slot, block shots and let the goalie see the rest. Matheson carries the heaviest load on the back end, and Danault and Evans take the key faceoffs. The weakness was the quality of chances allowed, which ranked in the bottom third of the league even though the goals-against rate stayed near average. That gap is the part of the special teams most exposed to a step back in goal.

What to watch. Two things move the needle here. First, the top power-play unit plays together for most of the man advantage, so an injury to Suzuki, Hutson or Caufield hits the power play harder than the depth chart suggests. Second, Guhle's return adds another trusted penalty killer and lets Montreal spread Matheson's minutes.

8What would change our view

• Second-line centerIf Kapanen takes his next step or Dach stays healthy in the role, the middle six gets better and the rating rises with it.
• Guhle's returnExpected around mid-October. A setback would keep an E-grade pair on the ice every night.
• Kreider's ageThe only core forward past 30. A sharp decline would thin the top six.
• The creaseGoalie form is noisy. A clear drop from Dobes would reopen the net, but it moves our number less than the headlines will.
• The chance gapIf Montreal starts winning the chance battle, the youth story is real and the rating climbs. If it keeps losing it with the same finishing, regression is coming.
• Early-season formThe first 20 to 30 games say less than they seem. Hot and cold starts mostly reflect shooting and goaltending swings, so we give them time before changing our view of the team.