With the NHL Draft less than a week away, let’s look at what we know for certain about what the Montreal Canadiens might do with the No. 5 overall pick.
It’s not a long list.
In fact, it’s only one item long: All things being equal, the Canadiens would like to add a forward.
A simple look at the organizational pipeline shows why this preference would make sense. Aside from Joshua Roy, who is looking like a solid potential top-six player, albeit more of a complementary one than a play-driver, there is not much there in terms of a surefire difference-maker at forward. There are a lot of maybes and some very promising bottom-six types, but there is no one in the Montreal system that projects as a top-line forward at this moment.
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So, drafting one this year makes a lot of sense.
But what if the Canadiens, instead of saying they wanted to add a forward, instead said they wanted to add offence? Would that change things? Because that is ultimately the goal here, to add offence, and whether it comes from a forward or a defenceman shouldn’t really matter.
Colleague Corey Pronman’s latest mock draft presents a scenario where the Canadiens could be faced with a dilemma of sorts, and where offence comes from would be at the heart of it. In that mock draft, Pronman had Macklin Celebrini going No. 1 to the San Jose Sharks, Artyom Levshunov No. 2 to the Chicago Blackhawks, Anton Silayev No. 3 to the Anaheim Ducks and, this one’s the kicker, Cayden Lindstrom No. 4 to the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Pronman then mocked Ivan Demidov to the Canadiens at No. 5, but a name that’s been linked to the Canadiens more and more went No. 6 to Utah, and that’s Denver University defenceman Zeev Buium, who just completed the most prolific NCAA season for a draft-eligible defenceman we have ever seen. Buium is not a forward, but he helps the process of pucks winding up in the net.
If the Canadiens want to add offence, who is the better option? The elite, highly-skilled winger who can produce offence out of nothing, who can beat guys one-on-one and has a laser of a shot? Or the silky smooth, puck-moving defenceman who can play 25 minutes a night and has extraordinary hockey sense and transition skill?
I decided to watch a sample of each of their games, choosing to focus on the bigger games of their season, so seven playoff games for Demidov and the semi-final and gold medal games at the world junior championships and four late-season games for Buium to try to come to my own conclusion.
The disclaimer I put out every year when I do this is necessary, but it’s especially important this year, because I truly have no idea what the Canadiens think of both players or which one they would choose under this hypothetical scenario. I am not a hockey scout, just someone who has watched a lot of hockey, and the sample size of games here is not nearly large enough to make a truly informed analysis of the two players. This is, frankly, surface-level analysis, so take it for what it’s worth. I tried to focus my attention on plays that did not necessarily result in goals to get a better sense of their games, and also on how they performed in pressure situations, which is why I chose this particular sample of games.
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Scouts take in far more information than this, and people who write about prospects on a regular basis do as well. Consider these more as observations than a full scouting report.
Ultimately, this exercise has less to do with Demidov and Buium specifically than it does the philosophical debate the Canadiens might be faced with at the draft table. It could just as easily apply to, say, Lindstrom and Zayne Parekh, or Beckett Sennecke and Sam Dickinson, or Tij Iginla and Levshunov. This is just the pairing I think is the most pertinent and realistic example of the decision the Canadiens might face next week in Las Vegas.
Ivan Demidov
Because he is a highly skilled, somewhat undersized Russian winger, Demidov has unfairly been compared to Matvei Michkov all season, especially when it comes to Montreal’s potential interest in him seeing as they passed on Michkov last year.
One of the reasons I believe the Canadiens passed on Michkov was the degree to which his willingness to compete would waver, and though I only watched Demidov’s playoff games, I did not see that same variance in competitiveness. He fights for pucks. He skates back hard on defence. He physically engages opponents. In other words, he cares, and it shows.
Is Demidov a defensive stalwart? An elite two-way player? No, of course not. But he was engaged in the game, at least in my viewings, in a way that was not the case in the games I viewed in Michkov’s draft year. Demidov’s compete does not appear to be an issue.
The skill to go with that compete is simply undeniable.
This is an entire shift in the third period of Game 1 of the MHL championship series against Yaroslavl with Demidov’s St. Petersburg down 5-3 that I think encapsulates a lot of what makes him such a uniquely dynamic player.
Demidov is No. 11 in white, the player who carries the puck back into the Yaroslavl zone near the beginning of the clip. Just follow that guy throughout this shift and you will see what makes Demidov special in so many ways, his shiftiness, his vision, his stickhandling, his shot, his engagement, his competitiveness, all of it is right here on a shift where, ultimately, nothing actually happens, while at the same time, everything is happening.
The net drive, the backhand saucer pass across the offensive zone onto a teammate’s tape, the movement, the awareness, the sharp-angle one-timer, Demidov shows a lot of his best self on this shift in a high-leverage situation late in a game his team would ultimately lose.
Earlier in the playoffs, against Spartak Moscow with a chance to eliminate them, St. Petersburg was down 4-1 when Demidov scored a hat trick including the overtime winner to finish the job. But that hat trick began on this play, which drew a penalty, and Demidov scored on the ensuing power play. It is an incredible play to watch, because there is no reasonable scenario in which that poor defenceman could ever expect Demidov to move like this as suddenly as he did.
One of the knocks on what Demidov did this season, putting up two points a game in the MHL, a league he was clearly too good to play in, is that he did it against lesser competition. This is a valid concern, one I tried to mitigate by focusing on his playoff games. But what doesn’t get mentioned nearly as often is that Demidov is also playing with lesser teammates, and he never acts like it. He rarely extended his shifts needlessly, rarely kept the puck on his stick too long, trying to do something himself, rarely acknowledged with his actions what is obvious watching him play, that he is far and away the best player on the ice at all times.
He supported his teammates when he didn’t have the puck and was very effective in getting them the puck in scoring areas when he did.
There is a whole lot to like about Demidov’s game. There are also valid questions to ask about how well it will translate to the NHL, especially considering the level of competition he faced this season, the lack of international competition, the lack of live viewings for the vast majority of teams (the Canadiens not being one of them) and the overall concern — justified or not — about the possibility Demidov will get squeezed into signing an extension to stay in Russia a bit longer.
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Then there’s the scarcity of player profile aspect of it all, that he is a highly skilled offensive winger. There tends to be possibilities of drafting one of those just about every year, and when they are a bit undersized — Demidov was measured by NHL central scouting Thursday at just over six feet — you can sometimes get them outside the top-10 in the draft. It’s a valid consideration for a team that hopes to not be picking in the top five next year, but could very well be in that 10-12 range.
Zeev Buium
Watching Buium play hockey makes you feel like you are at the symphony and there is a conductor making everything hum and sound perfect. And that is Buium. He has the ability to control and even dictate the rhythm of any game he plays. He does not have blazing speed, he lacks the physical gifts that make NHL scouts most excited — he is actually a shade shorter than Demidov at six feet even — but his ability to control that rhythm of the game is what makes him so rare and enticing as a prospect.
Defencemen who can do this, dictate a game’s pace and rhythm, while also showing an ability to defend effectively, truly displaying a two-way game, have a lasting impact in the NHL. Buium played massive minutes all season as a freshman defenceman for the University of Denver, the youngest defenceman in all of NCAA hockey. And his 50 points in 42 games this season were the most by a draft-eligible defenceman in NCAA history.
That’s all.
When you’re talking about scarcity of player profile, Buium certainly applies.
Buium has many similarities to Demidov. His skating is not exactly elite, same as Demidov. His brain for the game is totally elite, same as Demidov. And he produces offence, same as Demidov.
But Buium’s position as a defenceman, a left-shot defenceman who spent time this season playing the right side, makes him different from Demidov. It makes him more of a rarity, more of a player that is difficult to find outside the top five of the draft.
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And if there is one play I saw that demonstrates this rarity, it would be this one. It came in the NCAA championship game against Boston College, a game where Buium was on the ice constantly facing NHL first-round talent, and really played a largely conservative game. He wasn’t trying stuff like this all game. He was waiting for his moment, and when he found it, he struck.
This was the insurance goal that completed the scoring in the game, and it is a masterpiece from Buium, especially considering how he had avoided risky, aggressive plays like this all night.
That cut into the middle in the neutral zone to beat the first check attracting two BC players to him, and the immediate recognition of the space he had just created to slip the puck on the backhand to a teammate for the goal is a perfect encapsulation of what Buium does multiple times per game. There was a lot of information for him to process there, and he made the right decision at every turn, using his brain and his skill to manufacture a goal for his team at an extremely critical moment.
Another extremely critical moment for Buium was the world junior championship gold medal game as the only undrafted player on Team USA. He was coming off a semi-final performance against Finland that was difficult for him defensively. And yet, in this game in a hostile environment facing Sweden in front of their home crowd with the gold medal on the line, Buium totally shook that difficult game off. He left it behind him and played a solid game in a difficult environment as an underager.
This was in a tie game in the second period, and Buium had the confidence to use a quick change of direction — a staple of his game — to beat a forechecker and give the U.S. a clean zone entry.
Buium does this all the time, using deception to get a forechecker to bite in one direction and quickly changing course to get the puck going up ice.
Hockey sense can sometimes be as subtle as a little touch. Here, Buium’s stick blows up on him, leading to an odd-man rush toward Denver’s net. Just look at how little Buium has to do to turn the tables the other way once he collects a stick at the bench and gets back in the play.
That is hockey sense, knowing exactly where to put the puck, where the space is, where his teammates are, where the opposition is, without even looking.
At the other end, Buium’s defensive game has some positive aspects to it, most notably his gap control in the neutral zone defending against entries. He is aggressive on puck carriers before they hit the blue line and regularly breaks up rush attacks before they have a chance to develop.
Buium recognizes, however, that his play in the defensive zone will need to develop and adapt as he gets to the next level. But he prides himself on being a two-way defenceman, not an offensive defenceman, and there are elements of his defensive game that will translate to the next level.
“I thought my gap control, closing plays when it gets to the blue line, started to become really, really good toward the end of the year,” Buium said at the scouting combine in Buffalo. “For me, it was how to defend bigger, stronger guys, how to defend different kinds of players. Obviously, in the net front, I’m not the biggest guy, so it was how to use my strengths to my advantage, how to use what I’m really good at, my hockey IQ, my sense, to really defend bigger, stronger guys instead of trying to outmuscle them.”
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Much like Demidov, there is much to like about Buium’s game, but also valid questions for the Canadiens. He is 6-foot, 186 pounds and will face many of the same challenges Lane Hutson will defending in the NHL. He also has a similar skill set offensively to Hutson, and the Canadiens already have Hutson. They also have an army of other left-shot defencemen in the system, and there is already pressure on general manager Kent Hughes to alleviate that through a trade. Drafting Buium would only increase that pressure, though it could also allow Hughes to dangle some of the more promising defencemen in his group to try and acquire some help at forward.
From a team-building perspective, Buium doesn’t seem to fit. But with all the defencemen the Canadiens have, it is not difficult to see that none of them are quite like Buium, and also that defencemen like Buium are extremely rare. You generally can’t get a defenceman like this outside the top five in the draft, and frankly, the only reason the Canadiens might have a chance of drafting him is just how remarkable the defence class is this year.
Finally, drafting Buium would mean Hughes having to explain why he selected a defenceman over a hyper-talented winger who was sitting right there for the Canadiens at No. 5 a second year in a row. Personally, I think that argument would not be difficult to make, but that’s easy for me to say, because I wouldn’t be the one making it.
Again, this is not only about Demidov and Buium, but more generally about the Canadiens having to decide between a very talented forward with some question marks attached to him and a rare talent on defence. If Lindstrom and Levshunov are somehow both there at No. 5, and the Canadiens have concerns, let’s say, about Lindstrom’s back, they will need to go through this same exercise.
Ultimately, I don’t know which way that debate would turn. Looking solely at Demidov and Buium, I am personally torn between the two. They are both, to my eyes, potential game-breakers, offensive difference-makers the Canadiens are lacking, and when Hughes said that all things being equal they would prefer to draft a forward, this exercise makes that calculation very difficult to make.
When you dive deep on two players, there is no way all things can be equal. There are so many variables that go into an evaluation. And frankly, if the Canadiens didn’t already have all the defencemen they do in the system, I would probably lean heavily toward taking Buium under this scenario, because he seems to be the more scarce commodity. But they do have all those defencemen, and they have a clear lack of forward talent in the pipeline. I have never agreed with the notion that teams should not draft for need, but a lot of people do believe that, and in this case, it really feels like drafting Demidov would be drafting for need. Which, again, I am fine with.
But ultimately, all things are never equal. The Canadiens must look at their pipeline and their projected roster two or three years down the line and determine which player would best complete it, and which avenues will be available to them to complete that puzzle between now and then. And the reality of it is that while they could use a player like Demidov, they could use one like Buium as well.
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If Lindstrom and Demidov are both gone by the time the Canadiens pick, this becomes a much simpler decision, though that would probably mean Silayev would still be around and that could complicate things. But if one of the two forwards is there and Buium is as well, that decision could be the most important and impactful one this Canadiens administration has made to date.
(Top photo of Cayden Lindstrom, Macklin Celebrini, Zeev Buium and Artyom Levshunov: Dave Sandford / NHLI via Getty Images)