What’s Next For Young Canadiens’ Winger?

While a lot has been written and said about how Kent Hughes will be looking to improve the Montreal Canadiens over the summer, it must be remembered that he’ll also have to deal with a few expiring contracts. Joe Veleno, Kirby Dach, Zachary Bolduc, and Arber Xhekaj will all be RFAs at the end of June.

The easiest case to deal with will likely be Bolduc. The 23-year-old has just completed his ELC, and while he’s proven to be a promising young player, it feels like we’ve only just scratched the surface. In 78 regular-season games, Bolduc has put up 30 points, including 12 goals. In 2024-25 with the St. Louis Blues, he gathered 36 points and 19 goals, but 12 of his goals came on the power play. With the central division team, he had a plus-20 differential, but finished with a minus-6 with the Canadiens this past season.

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That’s not regression, that’s needing some time to adapt to a new way to play the game, the Martin St-Louis way. It’s a game that relies on reads and reactions rather than an established system, a man-on-man defensive system, which takes time to understand and process. If the youngster looked lost in defensive coverage early in the season, that happened a lot less in the later stages of the year.

While he averaged 1:36 of power play time per game, that was with the Canadiens’ less successful second unit, not with the big guns, so to speak, so it’s not all that surprising that his man-advantage production dropped from 12 points with the Blues to just six with the Habs.

Clearly, Bolduc has more to show, and that’s why he won’t be signing a long-term deal. Just like Dach and Alex Newhook, he’ll have to sign a bridge deal, which will allow the Canadiens to see what he can do as he develops as a hockey player under St-Louis’ tutelage. The former signed a four-year deal with a $3,362,500 million cap hit coming off a 26-point season in 70 games with the Chicago Blackhawks, while the latter had a four-year pact with a $2.9 million cap hit coming off a 30-point season in 82 games with the Colorado Avalanche. Both were former first-round picks, just like Bolduc. Dach went third overall, while Newhook was 16th overall, and Bolduc was 17th overall at the 2021 draft.

Bolduc’s last ELC year was quite similar to Dach and Newhook’s, so it’s highly likely that Hughes will follow the same blueprint with the Trois-Rivieres native. Given the fact that the salary cap will be going up for the next few seasons, his cap hit is likely to be higher than what Dach and Newhook had, but he really shouldn’t be all that expensive. He’ll likely come in somewhere between $3.5 and $3.75 million, since the GM will no doubt use his tried and tested recipe to sign his player to a team-friendly contract, giving himself as much cap flexibility as possible moving forward.

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