If Monday morning made it clear that Patrik Laine and Brendan Gallagher would move on, it didn’t provide as much clarity about forward Kirby Dach. When the Montreal Canadiens’ GM Kent Hughes was asked about the Albertan forward, he was really not committing in his comments:
We know he’s a talented player, but also very unlucky with injuries so far. But we have to sit down and have a chat with Kirby, probably during his exit meeting today. Then, Jeff, Marty, and I, Sedge (John Sedgwick – the Canadiens’ “capologist”) have to discuss his case, but it’s too early to talk about those things.
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The fact that he included Sedgwick in that answer is revealing. It feels like the Canadiens will have to think long and hard before making a qualifying offer to Dach. The 25-year-old is coming off a four-year contract with a $ 3,362,500 cap hit, meaning his qualifying offer has to be $4 million. That’s a lot of money for a player who has skated in 154 games out of a possible 328 over the last four years. That’s only 47% of the games the Habs have played.
His four-year deal was an audition of sorts, a chance to prove that he could play the role the organization acquired him to play, which was that of a second center. In 154 games, he has put up 77 points and has never had a better face-off percentage than 41.4 %. He finished the playoffs playing on the wing of the fourth line, and it’s safe to say that he will never be what the team bet on him being when they sacrificed Alexander Romanov to get him.
When Dach spoke to the media, however, he said he hadn’t had any talks about his contract yet and was looking forward to having that discussion. When asked about his season, he replied:
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I felt confident in my game, felt good, felt like whatever the coaching staff asked me to do, I was willing to do it, and I was able to do it.
To be blunt, we weren’t in the meetings Dach had with the coaching staff, but his play doesn’t pass the eye test. When he made that mistake against the Tampa Bay Lightning, which cost the Canadiens Game 2 of their first-round series, he was vilified online by fans, and there were calls to scratch him, but Martin St-Louis refused to do it. Dach rewarded him with his best game of the playoffs, putting up two points and playing a key role in the Game 3 win. After the game, the bench boss said he wouldn’t give up on a player who hadn’t given up on himself.
Unfortunately, Dach didn’t keep that level of performance throughout the playoffs, and he soon faded away, being pretty much invisible by the end of the Canadiens’ run. When the Habs were sent packing by the Carolina Hurricanes, Dach hadn’t had a point in nine games.
Of course, you can’t expect a player who gets fourth-line minutes to light up the scoreboard, but you can expect him to bring energy and a spark by making life hard on the opponent. That’s not what Dach did. He’s 6-foot-4 and 221 pounds, and if he were to play with speed and use his big body, he could make a difference, but more often than not, he doesn’t. When Dach was asked if the long playoff run helped with his next contract, he replied:
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Yeah, I think it was nice to kind of go on that run and be healthy, play the style that I needed to play.
When he was asked to summarize his time in Montreal, he explained:
It’s been a long couple of years, obviously, with the injuries and the surgeries. It adds up, and mentally it wears on you. Physically, it’s another thing. But for me, I just tried to have the same attitude: come to the rink every day and make sure I was doing everything I needed to do to be in the lineup.
Of course, it’s hard not to sympathize with a player who has gone through so many injuries, but at the end of the day, hockey is a business, and it’s about winning games and ultimately winning the Stanley Cup. By the end of the playoffs, it was hard to see what Dach was doing to deserve to be in the lineup over, say, someone like Brendan Gallagher, who would have given everything he had to get one last game with the Sainte-Flanelle. Not that the veteran would have changed the outcome of the series, but he at least would have brought some passion, some energy, a spark to lead his team into battle.
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At this stage, it’s hard to know what the Canadiens will elect to do with Dach. No one likes losing an asset for nothing, but it feels like, from what he has shown so far, he wouldn’t be worth the four million cap hit. If the Habs do not give him a qualifying offer, he will become an unrestricted free agent and be free to sign with any team or sign a new deal with the Canadiens for less money.
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