Canadiens: Comparing Bergevin and Hughes Draft Pick Value

The Montreal Canadiens have a well-documented history of questionable prospect development.

For roughly a decade, the team’s AHL affiliate managed to graduate one roster player: Jake Evans.

Recently, we’ve seen players such as Rafael Harvey-Pinard, Justin Barron, and Jesse Ylonen make their way to the NHL and enjoy some success, but for the most part, the pre-draft value has not translated into very many tangible assets for the organization.

It’s an issue that general manager Kent Hughes quickly addressed by revamping the development team personnel and improving the team’s yearly pre-draft value.

Before we start to take a look at the pre-draft value of the picks owned by the team during Hughes and Bergevin’s tenure, we must remind ourselves that they were working with a different set of circumstances.

Bergevin was focused on pushing the team from being a pretender to a contender, while Hughes has started the organization’s rebuild in earnest.

To understand the value of the picks under both general managers we will cross-reference them with Michael Schucker’s draft value chart, which assigns a pre-determined value to every pick in the NHL’s Entry Draft.

If you’d like to get a better idea of how draft-pick value charts work you can check out our recent deep dive into the world of draft-pick value by clicking here.

New Horizons

As you can see in the chart below, relative to his predecessors Hughes had done a fantastic job improving his team’s overall draft pick value.

Of course, owning the first overall pick in 2022 certainly helped his case since it held significantly more value than any other pick, but he also added value by acquiring an additional first-round pick.

This year the Montreal Canadiens own the 5th, 31st, 37th, 69th, 101st, 110th, 128th, 133rd, 144th, 165th and 197th picks in the Draft, which isn’t quite as appealing as their pick value the previous season, but it still eclipses every other draft year we’ve evaluated by a wide margin.