About a month ago, the Calgary Flames have sent a first round pick loaded with complicated conditions to the Canadiens to make sure they won’t have to deal with the last year of Sean Monahan’s contract. In their perspective, it was a much needed move in order to be able to fit Nazem Kadri’s contract under the team’s salary Cap. For Montreal, they are acquiring a first round pick and a hockey player.
Who is Sean Monahan?
If you Google his name, you will find out Sean Monahan is a hockey player with a pretty successful career so far. He scored over 20 goals in each of his first seven seasons, and even hit the 60-point mark several times. His HockeyDB page looks really good for a player who needed a sweetener to be moved. Without further ado, let’s take a deep dive in what the numbers say about Monahan and how can we get the best out of him.
Usually, when a move occurs, I think it is always a good idea to look at player cards to get a broad idea of who is a player before we dig more with video and more specific numbers. Here, on JFresh’s player card, we find out that there is a lot of red. Lots of red, more often than not, means that you should not expect miracles from this player. This player card is about WAR. WAR, wins above replacement, tries to estimate a player’s total contribution in one metric using a different parameters (EV Offense, EV Defense, and the other little square you see under the big red Proj. WAR square). It is not a perfect metric (and no metric is perfect), but it is a decent tool to use to give you an idea of how good is a player. Here, we understand that Sean Monahan has lost his top-6 role with the Flames and they were not willing to pay $6,400,000 for a 3rd line centerman.
Let’s see how his role shifted from being one of the good top-6 C’s of the league to being healthy scratched last season.
We can find out here that he still had the trust of his coaches at EV in 2020 and 2021, but he completely lost that trust last season. Since the Flames have acquired Elias Lindholm from the Hurricanes, they gave him the task to center the first line… which he did successfully. Monahan was then pushed to the 2nd line… until Mikael Backlund showed he was better than Monahan. Then, the Flames offer a big contract to Blake Coleman who was a big part of Tampa Bay’s 2021’s run to the Stanley Cup. Suddenly, Sean Monahan is a 4th line centre and for the 2nd time in his career, he gets healthy scratched. Monahan’s downfall is is peppered with multiple injuries that had an impact on his game.
He said to MTL’s media that the injuries were behind him, but are they? That will be one of main concerns for him. The Canadiens can certainly hope that he comes back close to full health if they want to get a serviceable veteran to help around the team’s young core. He could also be flipped at the trade deadline if he plays good, but it would be unrealistic right now to think he could fetch a significant return after he needed to be paired with a first round pick this summer to be moved.
On JFresh’s player card, there is a lots of red, but one of the rare blue spots are under the “PP” text, so I assume a big part of his WAR value comes from the fact that he is good on power-play. Don’t count on Monahan to be a big puck mover and create plays at 5v5 or on PP. He is a player who will make himself available on the ice to make a good shot when the puck gets on this stick. On the power-play, he plays in the middle for the 2 faceoff dots, just in front of the goalie. That’s where he scored most of his PP goals last season. Having Monahan on Power-Play means that the Canadiens won’t need to rely as much on player who are bad on power-play and play Monahan’s role on PP (like Josh Anderson and Brendan Gallagher).
The beautiful things about hockey research and hockey analytics is that you have in front of you a bunch of data, and some people need to make decisions based on the data you provided them. This is the part of the article where I put the shoes of someone in the Canadiens management and I say what I think of the data and my thoughts on how to optimize Monahan’s value on the team.
The first thing I want to make clear is that I think that Monahan is the 5th best centreman of the team.
Nick Suzuki
Christian Dvorak
Jake Evans
Kirby Dach
Sean Monahan
All the players are subject to potential improvement over the summer, but as of today, MTL’s #91 is not one of the best 4 C’s of the team according to my player evaluation. I notice that in the past three seasons, Monahan ranks 5th among the above-mentioned five players in Evolving-Hockey's WAR model. He ranks 5th in WAR per hour as well (and he is the only one of the 5 players with a negative impact). I also use Evolving-Hockey’s RAPM charts where we see that he is a below the average player with good PP impacts. Also, he doesn’t look dynamic at all in his skating strides (probably due to injuries) and we can get the impression that he is just lazy.
I do not think he should be confident in his chances of being in the lineup for the first game of the season. He will need to fight will all the other depth player for a regular spot in the lineup. The hope for Montreal is that he can rebound here.
And here is how he can be successful with the Canadiens.
Martin St-Louis will need to play him with wingers that like to have the puck on their sticks and who can pass him the puck. The first name who comes to my mind is Rem Pitlick. Also, Monny is going to have to win faceoffs. The Canadiens were in the middle of the pack in terms of faceoffs last season. Just like Dvorak, Monahan can use his experience at the faceoff dot to differentiate himself from the players also fighting for a spot in the lineup. Another thing that is under the radar is that he is playing for a new contract. Usually, players on expiring contracts have the habit of playing great seasons to earn a bigger deal during the summer. Lastly, he will need to be a leader in the Canadiens locker room. Montreal is a young team who is lost a lot of veterans this summer. Weber, Petry, (Price injured), etc. If he can stay healthy and do everything I said in this paragraph, the Canadiens can be really happy about the trade.
Kent Hughes has acquired a player that used to be really good but has a lot of uncertainty around his future. The Canadiens hope that his injuries are behind him and that he can focus on being the hero of a really cute comeback story. Monahan joins a team with a lot of forwards already and he should not think that a regular spot in the lineup is waiting for him. He is going to show he worth being a regular on this team. Any Habs fan should be excited to see a player that has accomplished that much join the team, but the fans should also not expect some miracles from him. With a summer of preparation, he said he is fully healthy. Let’s see if Monny is worth the money.