Better luck next year: The Montreal Canadiens can't get comfortable

They made the playoffs. Now the real work begins..

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs: The Montreal Canadiens.

When the 2024-25 NHL season began my expectation for the Montreal Canadiens was very simple: Just get better.

Hang around in the playoff race.

See improvement from their young core.

Hope somebody else emerges to be a part of it.

Try to get Patrik Laine’s career back on track.

They ended up doing pretty much all of that, and as an added bonus they found themselves in the Stanley Cup Playoffs as one of the bigger surprise stories in the NHL.

By pretty much any measure you want to go by, the season was a major success even with a first-round loss.

On a surface level the Canadiens have, in fact, taken a nice step forward in their rebuild and went from a mostly bad team to a pretty good and pretty promising team with a bright future ahead of them.

They can not get comfortable with that going into the offseason.

Mostly because the team still has some very significant flaws that could come back to hurt them next season if they do not improve them.

Also because it’s a lot harder to go from “good” to “contender” than it is to go from “bad” to “good.”

Let’s start with the biggest positive development for Montreal — their top-four scorers from this season are all age 25 or younger, and three of them are signed to long-term deals that look like they are going to be absolute bargains under a rising salary cap in the coming seasons.

Let’s talk about that, and more….