- THE ATHLETIC....
- Est persuadé...
- Que Marc Bergevin va échanger son choix de première ronde...
- OUIN..
- Quitte à repêcher un FLOP...
"The case for a trade: We’ll start with what should be, in theory, the easiest trade to sell you on, if only because it would involve the least valuable of the lottery picks. And the case here is a relatively straightforward one: The Habs are pretty good, and should be focused on getting better right now instead of waiting around for some middling first-rounder to make his NHL debut a few years down the road. After all, you don’t swallow big-dollar contracts for 30-something stars like Shea Weber and Carey Price without taking on at least some sense of urgency.
If you prefer a more positive spin, we could remind you that the 2017 Lightning barely missed the playoffs with 94 points and then went to the conference final in 2018, while the 2018 Blues barely missed the playoffs with 94 points and are in the conference final right now. Well, the 2019 Habs barely missed the playoffs with 96 points. They may not be as far from contending as you think they are.
Is it convincing?: It’s not a bad start. (And fair warning, if you’re already rolling your eyes at the thought of a team like Montreal even considering this sort of deal, you may just want to bail on the rest of this piece.)
The pessimist view is that Montreal isn’t as close to contending as their 2018-19 season suggests, and still have to get past Tampa Bay, Boston and Toronto, plus a potentially improved Florida team. But assuming that Marc Bergevin thinks he already has a solid foundation in place here, it might be worth it for him to find out what he could get if he dangled that 15th pick."