The Montreal Canadiens may not have to make these decisions tomorrow, but the expansion talk already sets up a brutal little puzzle for Kent Hughes.
The NHL has said it will explore adding a 33rd team, with Texas the likely destination and Austin or Houston mentioned as possible homes. If that happens, the league is expected to lean on the same expansion draft format it used for the Seattle Kraken, and that’s where things get messy for Montreal.
The first thing to know is that Ivan Demidov and Jacob Fowler would be safe. Players with only one or two seasons of professional experience in the AHL or NHL are exempt from the expansion process, so neither would be part of the conversation. That still leaves the Canadiens with a difficult choice: protect seven forwards, three defensemen and one goaltender, or go with seven skaters and one goalie.
On paper, the seven-forward route gives a team more room to shield players. In Montreal’s case, though, it also creates a headache because the Canadiens have real depth on the blue line, and Mike Matheson’s full no-movement clause means he has to be protected anyway. That makes the defense side especially tight.
If Montreal went with seven forwards and three defensemen, Matheson would be locked in, and Lane Hutson and Noah Dobson would likely join him. That would leave Kaiden Guhle, David Reinbacher, Adam Engstrom, Alexandre Carrier if he signs a new contract, plus depth defenders Jayden Struble and Arber Xhekaj exposed. It would also satisfy the likely exposure requirement on defense, which would call for one blueliner under contract in 2027-28 who played in 40 or more NHL games the previous season or 70 or more over the prior two seasons.
In goal, there’s no real debate: Jakub Dobes would be protected, since Fowler is exempt.
The tougher part is up front, where Montreal would have to decide which seven forwards stay on the list. Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky are obvious.
After that, the names get harder to sort through: Alex Newhook, Jake Evans, Oliver Kapanen and Zachary Bolduc are all in the mix. If that group were protected, players like Alexandre Texier, Owen Beck and Florian Xhekaj would be left exposed, though that would still meet the likely forward exposure rules, which would require two forwards under contract in 2027-28 who played in 40 or more NHL games the prior season or 70 or more in the previous two seasons.
If Montreal signed Phillip Danault and Josh Anderson to new deals, they could be the exposed players who help satisfy that requirement.
The other route, the seven-skaters-and-one-goalie option, gives Hughes more flexibility on defense. Dobes would still be protected in net, but Montreal could keep Matheson, Hutson, Dobson and Guhle at minimum, with David Reinbacher also a possibility.
That would already use up five skater spots, leaving only three for Suzuki, Caufield and Slafkovsky. It would also allow the Canadiens to meet the exposure requirements with Xhekaj, Struble and Engstrom exposed on defense, and Kapanen, Newhook, Evans, Texier, Florian Xhekaj and Beck exposed up front.
At the end of the day, this is a matter of choosing which pain Montreal can live with. The source material makes one thing clear: the Canadiens would be forced to leave good players unprotected either way.
Right now, the idea of exposing that many defensemen feels especially unlikely, because some core pieces would have to be left out of the protected group. Up front, the first line and Demidov are identified as the four certain core pieces, and they would all fit under the eight-skater approach.
That could change if Montreal lands another legitimate top-six forward in a trade, but that would mean revisiting the whole exercise. For now, the expansion picture looks less like a simple checklist and more like the kind of roster decision that can haunt a general manager for years.
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