Samuel Montembeault is still a Montreal Canadiens goalie on Monday, and that alone says plenty about this crease mess.
Kent Hughes now has three goaltenders capable of playing real NHL minutes, and only one net to give out. That math does not work forever.
Montembeault started last season as Montreal's guy. He finished it with 5 wins in 25 games and an .873 save percentage.
Jakub Dobes took the net and never gave it back. He posted a .901 save percentage over 43 regular season appearances.
Dobes carried that into the playoffs too, going 6-for-19 with a .907 save percentage across the entire postseason run.
Jacob Fowler, 21, forced his way into the picture as well. He went 9 wins in 17 games with a .908 save percentage and a shutout.
Montreal's season backed up the shift behind the bench. The Canadiens finished 48-24-10 for 106 points, sixth overall in the league.
They closed the year winning seven of their final ten games, then went 4-3 against Tampa Bay and 4-3 against Buffalo in the playoffs.
Three legit NHL goalies and only one net to share
That run ended against Carolina, where Montreal dropped four of five games after opening the series with a win.
Here is the part nobody wants to say out loud. Montembeault carries a $3.15 million cap hit. Dobes sits at $965,000. Fowler comes in at $923,333.
None of that is a cap problem on its own. It is a playing-time problem, and that is worse.
How many legitimate NHL goalies can one franchise realistically deploy before somebody gets buried for no good reason? Montreal is about to find out.
Trading Montembeault right now, coming off his worst save percentage of the three, would mean selling at the exact moment his numbers look shakiest.
It is a bit like owning three cars that all still run fine but only having one parking spot. Something has to move, or something just sits and rusts.
Martin St-Louis already showed who he trusts in a real game. Dobes played all 19 of Montreal's playoff games.
Montembeault did not appear in a single playoff game. Fowler got exactly one outing, finishing with a .500 save percentage in that lone appearance.
That pecking order is the real story here, not the cap numbers. Montembeault is now the third option on a depth chart he used to own outright.
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Nothing about this gets resolved with a press release. Somebody starts training camp buried, and Hughes still has to decide what that somebody is worth to another team.
Should the Canadiens trade Samuel Montembeault this summer even at a discount?
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