Jean-François Houle’s ability to develop Canadiens’ future rightly won out over results

There is a belief — and it is not without merit — that the Montreal Canadiens have a responsibility and a need to develop their own coaches in the AHL. Because the coach of the Canadiens needs to be able to communicate in both of Canada’s official languages, the belief is the coach of the Laval Rocket should be someone who can realistically coach the Canadiens one day.

It is hard to say if the Canadiens see Jean-François Houle in that light. They might, they might not. But one light in which they clearly see Houle as a valuable asset to what they are trying to build is player development, because the Canadiens will have a ton of future NHL players coming through Laval, and actually getting those players to the NHL in the near future is an important job.

It could easily be argued that job is more important than developing the Canadiens’ next coach, and it is one the Canadiens entrusted Houle to fill for the next three years when they signed him to a contract extension Wednesday, a little more than a month before his contract was to expire.

That term of three years coincides perfectly with the term left on the contract of Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis after the team picked up its two-year option on his contract as soon as the season ended. The two are now tied at the hip, and the confidence the Canadiens have in St. Louis is also tied to the confidence they have in Houle, because it makes it clear the Canadiens don’t feel they need a coaching safety net in Laval.

Again, maybe the Canadiens view Houle as their next head coach. Maybe. But what seems obvious is they view him as a key component of stewarding the transition players will be making from Laval to Montreal over the next three years, because the job Houle has done in that regard already has given them that confidence.

That doesn’t mean Houle doesn’t have NHL aspirations — he clearly does — but the way things are looking right now with St. Louis, those aspirations might not necessarily be achieved in Montreal in the near future. And Houle seems fine with that.

“For a coach, every path is different,” Houle said in a video conference Wednesday. “Some come from the AHL, some come from being an assistant coach in the NHL, some come from the NCAA, every path is different for every coach. I’m a patient man. I think it’s important to enjoy the moment, the present moment, where you are right now. That’s what I intend to do. If there’s an opportunity that arises in this organization, or other organizations, I’m always there to listen.

“But I always try to not look too far. I live in the present quite a bit.”

And the present for Houle means showing players such as Owen Beck and Filip Mešár and Florian Xhekaj and Luke Tuch how they can use Laval as a launching pad for their NHL careers. When you add those names to the young players who were already in Laval in Sean Farrell, Riley Kidney, Logan Mailloux, Emil Heineman and others, the challenge for the Rocket next season will be very similar to this season, when they dug themselves too deep of a hole early and simply ran out of time to dig themselves out.

Winning is not only an important part of development, it is also a way for an AHL coach to raise his profile, and doing that with such a young team in a league where older teams tend to have the most success this time of year may seem like mission impossible. So, it is important for the organization, but important for Houle’s aspirations as well.

“In the medium-term, it will be to find a way to win with young players,” Houle said. “Yes, it’s possible, and yes, it’s important. So that will be the biggest challenge for our coaching staff again this year, to develop players well but also to have the team show progress.”

Luckily, there is an AHL team currently showing them a path.

The AHL conference finals are playing out right now, with the Hershey Bears facing the Cleveland Monsters in the East, and the Coachella Valley Firebirds facing the Milwaukee Admirals in the West. Looking at the top five scorers on each team prior to Friday night’s game, the guys driving the bus are generally veterans. Coachella has no one in its top five scorers younger than 25. Cleveland has blue-chip Columbus Blue Jackets defence prospect David Jiříček leading the team in scoring, but the next four on the list are undrafted veterans. Hershey is led by Washington Capitals first-round pick Hendrix Lapierre, and fellow first-rounder Ivan Miroshnichenko is fifth in scoring, but the other three are AHL veterans.

Then there’s Milwaukee.

The Admirals’ top five scorers heading into Game 2 of their series against Coachella on Friday night are all 23 or under, four of them are AHL rookies and there are three first-round picks and a second-round pick.

So, Houle was right. It is not only possible, it is actually happening right now.

How have the Admirals done it?

“We do have a younger group of forwards, but I would say they’re very talented,”Admirals coach Karl Taylor said in a phone interview Thursday. “We do have a lot of high picks on our team, so the talent is very high. How do we manage our youth? Step one is our leadership group.”

That would be defencemen Kevin Gravel and Roland McKeown, forward Cal O’Reilly and goaltender Troy Grosenick. Gravel and McKeown have each already won a Calder Cup elsewhere, O’Reilly has played nearly 1,000 AHL games and another 154 in the NHL and Grosenick is a local product with more than 300 AHL games under his belt.

“Having some older players that have been around that understand and are willing to mentor some of the younger players, that’s a really critical piece that we’ve been fortunate to have in the locker room,” Taylor said.

This is something Houle has already identified as a need for the Rocket. But the key thing for Taylor is the success those veterans had already experienced, whether that’s AHL playoff success or just a wealth of games in the league.

Last offseason, the main veteran free agents the Canadiens brought in to Laval on two-way deals were forwards Lias Andersson and Philippe Maillet and defenceman Brady Keeper. Andersson was a high draft pick, but otherwise had not had a whole lot of success in North America, with three AHL playoff games under his belt. Same for Keeper, whose season was derailed by injuries. Maillet came in from the KHL, where he made it to the 2022 Gagarin Cup final with Magnitogorsk, but had played eight AHL playoff games and two NHL games with the Capitals in five seasons prior.

Perhaps looking for players with previous AHL success the way the Admirals did might be a guideline for the Rocket this summer.

“I think there’s a middle ground that we have to meet, and I think that’s what we intend to do as an organization, to have a good mix of both (veterans and young players),” Houle said. “Again, you don’t want the veteran guy who’s probably not going to play in the NHL in the near future to be in the way of a young player. That kind of defeats development. So there’s a middle ground that we’re going to reach. The organization is aware of it, I’m aware of it, and we want to make sure we put a really good product on the ice for our fans in Laval, who are very important to us.

“I’m pretty positive that we’ll find a middle ground in getting the right players.”

The other important factor for the Admirals’ younger players this season that Taylor mentioned is something that is not very replicable. On Dec. 31, 2023, the Admirals lost 4-3 to the Rockford IceHogs. Their next loss came on Feb. 25, following a 19-game winning streak to start the calendar year that caught the attention of the entire hockey world.

“That accelerated our growth for our youth, because they just got so invested in enjoying that, enjoying some of the articles and the media attention,” Taylor said. “It just kind of grew and became something. It wasn’t playoffs obviously, but it was kind of a neat thing within the season that the group really focused on. We didn’t talk about it a whole lot, but let’s be honest, we all knew it was happening as we were going through it, and I think it was a pseudo playoff run for us.

“It allowed them to believe and understand that they can do this, that I can be a good player at this level, and when that occurs, the belief grows very quickly when looking ahead to the playoffs.”

Of course, a 19-game winning streak is not something you can bank on happening in developing your young players, but it does show the impact a stretch of regular season success can have on a group of young players trying to find its way through the often choppy waters of the AHL. And now those young players are in meaningful games, having already staved off elimination three times after falling behind 2-0 in their first-round series against the Texas Stars.

“It’s a great situation for the Nashville Predators,” Taylor said. “We have a young forward group that is excelling at the most important time of the season.”

The challenge for the Canadiens is not to perfectly reproduce what the Admirals have done, but they do need to create a similarly successful environment for the development of their young players, because the team will once again be quite young. In fact, it will probably be even younger than this season’s team.

In that sense, bringing Houle back was a bit of a no-brainer. He has proven an ability to graduate players from Laval to Montreal relatively seamlessly, something that has earned regular praise from St. Louis. He’s been willing to play young players in important situations knowing the result might suffer, but the development will not. And he is a popular coach among his players, young and old.

“He’s a player’s coach,” said Rocket defenceman Tobie Paquette-Bisson, an AHL veteran who helped mentor Mailloux and David Reinbacher this season and needs a new contract. “I think it’s always been what people say: he’s there for the players, easy to talk to, everyone loves him.

“You’ll never hear a player that doesn’t like him. I think he’s a really good fit with the Rocket.”

(Top photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)