The Montreal Canadiens have picked up the two year option on head coach Martin St. Louis’ contract the team announced Wednesday. In doing so, he’ll be behind the Habs bench for the next 3 seasons and will be tied to the franchise through June 30th, 2027.
The 48 year old Stanley Cup champion has now wrapped up his second full season with Montreal, amassing a 75-100-26 record in the process. While the Canadiens finished outside the playoffs for the 3rd straight season, they once again increased their point total, going 30-36-16 in 2023-24.
News of St. Louis’ extension was welcomed by the Canadiens roster who voiced their approval on social media and during their media availability. “He’s just great,” said Slafkovsky. “Off the ice, his ideas, it’s just something else. You don’t get a coach like that often, and he’s the smartest guy of all of us. It’s just great. When he says something, you look at things in a different way, and I feel like with what we’re trying to build, a lot of that is his ideas and if we just connect everything together, we’ll be good.”
“He’s our leader, it starts there,” said Brendan Gallagher. “He has a ton of belief. I’m not joking with you guys that when we needed to win probably our last 18 games in a row, he believed we were going to make the playoffs. This is someone who has an incredible belief in what we’re building in our group, and as a player it feels amazing to play for a guy like that because he’s all in. He wants it just as bad as we do. He puts in the work, he puts in the time, and, as players, that’s something you really appreciate.”
A 2018 Hockey Hall of Fame inductee, St. Louis brings a unique perspective to the bench, and would certainly skew towards the “player’s coach” end of the coaching spectrum than the hard nosed taskmaster.
“He doesn’t believe he has all the answers,” Montreal general manager Kent Hughes said. “He’s able to reflect on what he’s doing as a coach, what we need to do as a team to take input from the analytics group about where we appear to be deficient, at least what the data is saying, and then work to come up with solutions. And I think that’s true of our coaching staff, so that gives us reassurance that where we see issues, they’re bright and motivated and dedicated to fixing those.”
“There’s a lot to him, and I think he takes pride in the fact that he’s always getting better and we see that and we talk about it all the time and we’ve said it a number of times, he’s very impressive and he’s the right person for what we’re doing,” Canadiens EVP of hockey operations Jeff Gorton said. “And there’s not a day goes by where we’re not happy that he’s at the helm, that he’s out front.”
With their head coach now locked up for the foreseeable future, Montreal can turn their attention to the offseason where they have the 6th best odds at securing the number 1 overall pick in the 2024 NHL Draft.
Photo: Ken Lund. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.