Patience can be a virtue and it’s one that Montreal Canadiens fans and management alike will have to exercise entering the 2024-25 season. Montreal is still amid a rebuild and while its fan base is eager for the club’s first playoff appearance since a star-crossed run the 2020 Stanley Cup Final, the reality is that the club is still a year away from contending for a postseason ticket — to say nothing of its deeper, further ambitions.

Montreal finished with the fifth-worst record in the NHL and it didn’t make massive, reactionary changes to its roster. Patrik Laine and a 2026 second-round pick were acquired in exchange for promising young defenceman Jordan Harris, while fellow blueliner Johnathan Kovacevic was shipped to the New Jersey Devils for a 2026 fourth-rounder. The team was relatively inactive throughout the summer and while it’s the best course of action for the Canadiens in the long run, the simple truth of the matter is that this club is still on an uphill climb through the NHL’s most difficult division, and will need to shed some onerous contracts for further flexibility — Brendan Gallagher’s $6.5 million and Josh Anderson’s $5.5 million cap hits over the next three seasons are among the worst deals in the league and it’ll be incumbent upon Kent Hughes to find a way to get them off the books.

There is a pathway for future contention laid out clearly and Martin St. Louis has been a great, pragmatic mentor to the Canadiens’ young roster, but this season will ultimately be singularly graded by how the team’s young core performs and matures on their eventual path to competing for a Stanley Cup. Here’s what you need to know about the 2024-25 Montreal Canadiens.

At the risk of being repetitive, repeat after me: all that matters for the 2024-25 Canadiens is how their young players continue to mature into bonafide NHL stars, while clearing a pathway for the next graduates from Montreal’s deep prospect pool!

Nick Suzuki (25), Cole Caufield (23), Juraj Slafkovsky (20), Kirby Dach (23), Alex Newhook (23), Joshua Roy (21), Kaiden Guhle (22) and David Reinbacher (22) form one of the most potent under-25 groups in all of hockey, and these eight players should all still be on the Canadiens’ roster two seasons from now when the team can begin their march from also-ran to powerhouse. But it will take time, we can’t just hit fast forward. And as currently presented, this team is going to struggle on both ends of the ice.

We’ll start with the relative lack of offensive firepower. Caufield led the Canadiens with 38 points at 5-on-5, which tied for 46th in the NHL and his plus-14 goal differential at 5-on-5 on a team that finished with a -53 goal differential in all situations speaks to his immense talent, while Suzuki isn’t far behind, tied for 70th with several others after recording 37 points at 5-0n-5 But from there onwards, the production dries up immediately. Caufield, Suzuki, Slafkovsky and Brendan Gallagher are the only Montreal players to crack the top 200 scorers at 5-on-5 and it’s not as if the Canadiens were disproportionately strong on the power play, ranking 27th in the NHL with the man advantage last year. Something has to change for Martin St. Louis and his stuff and relying on internal development and some better injury luck (particularly for Dach) isn’t enough of a catalyst.

Montreal is well-armed for the immediate future with a war chest that amounts to: two 2025 first-round picks, two 2025 second-round picks, three 2025 third-round picks, a 2026 first-rounder and two 2026 second-round picks. This is really damn good, especially when you consider the advanced scouting on the 2025 class, where James Hagens almost certainly would’ve gone first in 2024, with depth promised throughout the opening round.

When you consider that the Canadiens hit a 450-foot home run this summer by selecting Ivan Demidov and Michael Hage in the first round, two forwards with obvious star potential, this season is all about the core’s maturation, biding its time to strike. The future is extremely bright in Montreal, you’ll just have to overlook the dim forecast for this winter.

We’ve covered how the Canadiens may struggle to score, but it’s going to be even worse on the back end. Montreal surrendered 281 goals last season, tied for the fifth-worst total in the NHL and there doesn’t appear to be an immediate pathway to improvement.

Montreal needs to find a way to protect Kaiden Guhle — this perhaps reads as paternalistic as he’s proven himself to be a legitimate top-four defenceman in the NHL, but he’s still developing and it’s incumbent upon St. Louis and his staff not to throw him to the wolves. Guhle was paired with Mike Matheson and they were the Canadiens’ most-used combination at 5-on-5, playing 450 minutes together with a minus-six goal differential while controlling just 46 percent of the expected goals. Guhle fared better in minutes with Justin Barron, but it was against weaker competition and if Montreal is going to run back this unit as its top pairing, it has to considering using Guhle carefully — there’s no point of running him into the ground on nights where the Canadiens are trailing badly.

Lane Hutson may very well be Montreal’s best defenceman when the team enters its contention window and he received a brief taste of the NHL last season, signing a three-year, entry-level deal with the Canadiens immediately after Boston University’s season ended. Hutson recorded two assists in two games and he immediately projects as Montreal’s No. 3 defenceman at just 20 years old.

Lauded for his exceptional vision, breakout passing, lateral movement and ability to evade oncoming forecheckers, Hutson is one of the most exciting figures in the sport but it’s quite another thing to exercise these qualities against the best players in the world. We’re in the Quinn Hughes era now, being diminutive isn’t considered an inherent disadvantage but this doesn’t mean the Canadiens can be careless. Hutson is projected to begin the year with David Savard, who is often mismatched against top-six opponents, and he’ll have to be monitored carefully as the Canadiens don’t want to halt his development.

Sam Montembeault may be asked to face another massive workload as Montreal’s young stars are tasked with carrying their older, more experienced partners on the back end. Montembeault has quietly withstood one of the largest workloads in the NHL and hasn’t cracked under the pressure, saving 3.3 goals above expected at 5-on-5 via MoneyPuck in 41 games, while Cayden Primeau saved 3.6 goals above expected in 23 games. Montembeault is firmly established as the starter but he’ll need to elevate his game into another tier if the Canadiens are going to continue to surrender possession and high-danger chances at a rate comparable to the worst teams in the NHL. It’s an unsustainable formula to rely on your goaltenders to continue to outperform expectations and while Guhle and Hutson will be worth watching on a nightly basis, this could be another year of calculated struggle from the Canadiens.

Projected finish: 8th place in Atlantic Division