Friday, January 21, 2011

Habs Precariously Shallow Up Front

What you know is that the Canadiens imported Ryan White and Andreas Engqvist from Hamilton to cover for flu and other injuries to the forwards on the beat up Habs.

What you knew is that this team alredy starts rookies Lars Eller and David Desharnais to go with depthy forwards like Tom Pyatt.

What perhaps you didn't know is that this isn't far from the absolute limit of the Canadiens organizational depth.

Yesterday, I read an interesting piece from Ron Reusch that raised a red flag for me. It was addressing the promotion of Dany Masse, and what it meant:
With those three forwards out, and now losing Engqvist, it’s forced the Bulldogs to get some help, as well. The problem is the Canadiens/Bulldogs really only have one forward left in their system that isn’t already here or up in Montreal.

That’s Dany Masse, who has one goal and eight assists in 29 games with the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL. Masse, a left-winger, played one game with the Dogs earlier this year and was held pointless. So they called him up.

This is the full depth chart as I can tell:



Not promising for the Habs. I guess it's really a Bulldogs level problem, actually. Not a problem that can't be resolved with a minor league signing, but all the same, it illustrates why Andreas Engqvist is joining the Montreal Canadiens and David Desharnais is suddenly a third line player.

You will note that on the big team, this is a big thing. one significant injury and it's suddenly 4 rookies in the line up with a few second years.


What to do?

I didn't write this piece because I had a good idea for a solution here. I just wanted to show the depth chart, which I hadn't really been thinking about. I don't have any great new ideas, and I'm still cold on trading to get someone in at the top end of this chart (risk:benefit stuff). Maybe Hamilton just needs to restock in case the Habs need Palushaj or Maxwell...

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