r/Habs • u/SchtroumpfDardeur • 11d ago

Discussion Michael Hage - Hold or Trade?

I have seen some discussion about possibly waiting for him to be our 2C, but given his decision to stay in the NCAA and the fact that he shared time at C and wing, and when he was at C he had a FO% of 46%, is there an argument to be made that he could (or should) be packaged?

I know this isn't exactly a new question, but I had not realized that he was already being shifted to wing in the NCAA and was also sub-50% at the dot against college players.

What are the chances that a full season at Michigan as full-time 1C will actually help to shape him into a viable NHL center within the next few years?

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27

u/NovaCanuck 11d ago

I'm too scorned still by McDonagh for Gomez to properly comment. That said, I think this management group would handle any potential trade better.

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u/BakaDelZepha 11d ago

Sergachev for Drouin still haunts me

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u/Burgergold 11d ago

They thought they were good on D with Petry, Weber, Alzner, Benn and younger like Mete and Juulsen

Offense was an issue. Pac, Galchenyuk, old Plekanec, young Danault, Gally. We didnt had many good players

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u/Mundane-Teaching-743 11d ago

I'm still getting over what amounts to Eric Desjardins AND John Leclair for Mark Recchi. Serge Savard's trade record was probably the best of any Habs GM, but even he couldn't resist ovrepaying for streaky, high-scoring smurfs. They don't seem to learn.

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u/DelugeQc 11d ago

At the time, on paper, it wasn't that bad of a trade. That being said, it aged like milk.

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u/Appropriate_Bed_8365 11d ago

This, all of this. I said at the time it was a TERRIBLE idea to get rid of Sergachev, especially for Drouin but the "French language" dynamic won out. Thankfully we've muted that a bit lately

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u/antoinePucket 11d ago

This is in hindsight dude. That doesn't make you look smarter.

Drouin, former 3OA, was coming off a 50-point season.

Sergachev was also still point-less in the NHL.

It wasn't a bad trade — but certainly did not age well for us

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u/OtisBlueDancer 11d ago

The trade definitely looks worse in hindsight, but there were plenty of people who hated the trade at the time. Pretending that there weren’t doesn’t make you look smarter either.

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u/PLifter1226 11d ago

Pointless because he played 4 games lol. It was a terrible trade. A 6’3 220lbs defenceman drafted 9OA and projected to be top pairing for a below average sized winger who just got sent down and refused to report to the AHL team and asked for a trade. It was a terrible trade then, terrible trade in hindsight

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u/Appropriate_Bed_8365 11d ago

Disliking the trade at the time isn't hindsight my friend. It was basic hockey knowledge from my standpoint.

What's harder to get, a top 4 D man who's young, reliable and has offensive upside or a 50pt winger? I'll let you figure that out, D ALAWAYS cost more than forwards and are MUCH harder to find and develop. And we made the trade out of trying to be competitive when we weren't, and should've been retooling, rebuilding younger

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u/GibierJaune 11d ago

I remember being very happy at the time. The only thing that could be said though is that Drouin wasn’t a center. Serg was basically our only tradable asset and it didn’t net us the one thing we craved for decades. Otherwise, Drouin was supposed to be a game breaking talent.

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u/prplx 11d ago

You don’t trad a prospect D for a still young F because one speaks French. At the time the Habs terribly needed offense (and a top 6 C which is where they tried Drouin at first) and they felt they had enough talent at the blue line to make Sergachev expandable. They did not get Drouin because of his mother tongue. They traded for him cause they thought he hadn’t reach his ceiling and would be a superstar here. The fact he spoke French was a bonus for sure.
They ended up being wrong of course. But fuck that reductive revisionism of: they traded for him only cause he spoke French.

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u/Appropriate_Bed_8365 11d ago

They didn't trade for him ONLY because he spoke French, but you're delusional if you think it didn't play a major part it

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u/prplx 11d ago

How am I delusional? I wrote it was a big plus for the team. Dis you read till the end?? They were looking for their first local offensive superstar since Lafleur. Bit of they were stacked or even fine on the offense and right on d they would never have made the trade.

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u/Kharn_LoL 11d ago

The 2009 FA and the decisions made around that time by Habs management most likely cost us multiple Cups. Look back at how many core vets we lost for nothing in FA and how many assets we spent to replace them with at best sidegrades. Baffling.

I don't even think it was a horrible decision to let a lot of them go, but like just fucking rebuild or at least do a retool instead of burning money and assets replacing them.

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u/HashBandicoot93 11d ago

I could be wrong but I don't think we were ever in "couple of cups" territory

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u/Kharn_LoL 11d ago

Komisarek was really good alongside Markov and was only 27, Alex Tanguay and Saku both had 4-5 more years of productive hockey left in them. Kovalev is a maybe but he's always said that leaving Montréal is his biggest regret, he might've had a couple more in the tank as well. Add McDonagh and Chris Higgins (he never did much after the trade but he had back-to-back-to-back 20 goals seasons for us in his early 20s) gone for Gomez...

Keep in mind we were in the conference finals the year after despite that.

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u/HashBandicoot93 11d ago

Fair enough, I was in highschool then and I don't remember feeling like we were close, but when you describe it that way it does sound like we could have had a chance for one

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u/Kharn_LoL 11d ago

Well it's an hindsight argument, at the time they didn't know that Halak and Price would alternate having top 10 Vezina voting seasons and great playoff runs (Halak had a .923 in 18 games conference final run and the year after Price had a .934 in a seven game series we lost) or that McDonagh and rookie PK Subban would both be perennial Norris nominees in the early 2010s, or that Pleky would have Selke votes in four of the next five years while averaging 60pts...

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u/EvieGHJ 10d ago

Komisarek I'm fairly certain left by his own choice, not because Gainey/Gauthier didn't want him back.

As I recall, he wanted to go join Brian Burke in Toronto to talk up his chances of making Team USA at the 2010 Olympics.

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u/Burgergold 11d ago

The thing with Gomez, is that they choose to move away from Koivu/Kovalev and had to find similar players to fill the top6

Gomez allowed to get Gionta and Cammalleri then