The Canadiens’ young core is starting to look like the kind of group every team wants but few actually manage to keep together.
What stands out in Montreal right now isn’t just that Juraj Slafkovsky or Ivan Demidov seem willing to take less than they might have gotten elsewhere. It’s why they’re doing it. The bigger story is that the Canadiens have built something these players want to be part of.
Demidov’s agent, Dan Milstein, said his client wanted the eight-year deal and wanted it finished fast so Montreal would have the flexibility to add other players. That extension comes with a $9.15-million cap hit. Slafkovsky, meanwhile, has said he wants Stanley Cup rings more than extra money.
That matters because this isn’t some isolated one-off. Montreal has lined up a young group around Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Slafkovsky, Demidov and Lane Hutson, with Noah Dobson and Kaiden Guhle also in the long-term picture.
And this isn’t all theory anymore. The Canadiens reached the Eastern Conference Final last season, so these players have already seen what a winning team can look like up close.
That’s where the comparison with Toronto gets interesting.
The Maple Leafs’ famous young core was never really the problem in the simple way people like to frame it. Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander weren’t failures because they didn’t care enough.
They were elite players who were paid like elite players. The issue was what came next: Toronto poured so much money into its top forwards that it spent years trying to patch together everything around them.
The result was plenty of regular-season success and no championship to match the hype.
Now the ending of that era is clear. Marner is gone.
The Maple Leafs missed the playoffs last season. Matthews has two years left on his contract and has already said he can’t predict what his future will look like after that.
Montreal is taking a different approach, and that’s what makes these deals worth paying attention to. The Canadiens are not necessarily asking their young stars to sacrifice huge sums. They’re getting them to understand that the biggest number on the contract sheet is not always the most important one.
If Demidov turns into a superstar, $9.15 million will look like a steal. If Slafkovsky becomes the player Montreal believes he can be, that deal should age well too.
But the real advantage may be broader than that. The players seem to understand the plan, and Toronto never quite found that balance.
The Leafs had talented players. They had good teams.
They even had some excellent ones. What they never really had was enough cheap young talent arriving at the right time to grow alongside the expensive stars and keep the roster in balance.
That’s the lesson Montreal seems to be chasing. It’s not that you should avoid paying your best players. It’s that you can’t let your best players become the entire blueprint.
For Toronto, that point lands even harder when you look at the current roster. Matthews, Nylander and Knies are there.
Paying them is not the problem by itself. The real issue is assuming a handful of expensive stars can carry the whole structure around them.
They can’t. Every million committed to one player is money that disappears from somewhere else, and that’s the salary-cap reality the Maple Leafs have lived with for years.
Montreal’s young players appear to get that. They’re acting like a group that wants to win together and leave enough room for the team to stay strong around them.
Of course, none of it is proven yet. The Canadiens haven’t won anything.
They have a promising core, a deep playoff run on the resume and players who seem genuinely eager to stay linked together. Now they have to show that all of that still holds when the contracts get bigger, the pressure grows and the losses start to sting.
Toronto knows exactly how hard that part is. The Maple Leafs’ own young core was once treated the same way Montreal’s is being treated now, with Stanley Cup dreams attached before the job was anywhere close to done.
So no, Montreal isn’t suddenly on the other side of the argument. But it is worth watching. For the first time in a long time, the Canadiens look like they might be figuring out what Toronto spent years trying to build: a young core that wants to win together and understands that the stars themselves can’t be the whole salary-cap plan.
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For a fan base still hoping for one more offseason swing, the timing matters because it likely shuts the door on any straightforward signing, including professional tryouts, unless the Leafs clear space through a trade or another roster move. Trades are still on the table, so the front office is not out of options, but the path to any further additions just got a lot narrower. [Read more 🡒]