Ivan Demidov could lose his driver's license until January, and the Montreal Canadiens forward now has a court verdict hanging over his recovery.
The story broke Wednesday at noon, when Camille Payant of the Journal de Montréal reported the 20-year-old is dealing with two speeding infractions.
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The summer ticket is the one in play. Demidov was flagged at 111 km/h in a 70 zone, and he swears he wasn't going that fast.
He also walked away from that stop believing his license was safe. That's what he understood from his exchange with the officer.
Then the paperwork moved without him. The ticket was paid in July by the team's director of player security, which counted as a guilty plea.
On Friday, a lawyer stood before a judge at the courthouse and asked to cancel that payment. The request called it an error.
A probationary license and only one point left to lose
Here's where it gets ugly. The young forward drives on a probationary license that carries just four demerit points.
He'd already burned three of them during the Olympic break, caught doing 145 km/h on the highway toward Trois-Rivières.
That left him with exactly one. It's the driving version of a credit card with a single dollar left on the limit.
A guilty verdict on the July ticket pulls his license until January.
For now, the judge allowed the guilty plea to be withdrawn. Demidov keeps driving until Montreal's municipal court rules.
The staffer's explanation is the part that should make people in the Canadiens front office wince.
“This first payment having had no apparent consequence on Mr. Demidov's license, I treated the July 21, 2026 ticket the same way, as a simple administrative formality,” he said.
That's a bad process. Nobody should be clearing a 20-year-old's tickets on autopilot when his license hangs on one point.
And the kid isn't exactly helping his own case with that heavy right foot.
On the ice, he's already sidelined. The Russian forward sits on injured reserve with a lower-body injury and is expected out until at least Oct. 31.
Before getting hurt, he'd put up a goal and an assist in two games. That's point-per-game hockey on a $940,834 cap hit.
Does a traffic verdict change anything on the scoresheet? No. But it's one more off-ice headache Kent Hughes didn't need in October.
The Canadiens sit at 3-2-1 after a 4-3 shootout win over Buffalo on Tuesday night, their second straight shootout victory.
Tonight they close a back-to-back in Washington against a Capitals team that has dropped two straight, including a 4-2 loss in Carolina on Tuesday.
Lane Hutson keeps driving the offense from the blue line in the meantime. He scored on the power play against the Sabres and has 6 points through 6 games.
Montreal has still allowed 22 goals against 19 scored, so the club badly needs its skill back in the top six.
No verdict has come down yet. And if the court rules against him, the hardest questions in Montreal won't be about how fast Demidov was driving.
Should the Canadiens take the blame if Ivan Demidov loses his license?
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