Holy crap, the Canadiens have waived Nikita Scherbak.
Look, I'm an asset-protecting nerd, and I cut the cord way way too late on most prospects/players, but this is almost passive-aggressive no? You have Michael Chaput and Forgethisfirstname D'Agostino on your 23-player roster and Nikita Scherbak is the guy you waive?
There was a little bubble of an article/vignette earlier this year on the Canadiens' site, where he showed the New Media arm of the website cameras his modest apartment, with his girlfriend proudly standing alongside him, and I thought it was a little premature, to showcase him like that, like he was an established player. And I know for a young lady intent on growing her Instagram brand instead of, you know, studying up to be a doctor and contributing to society, dating-landing a Canadien is a good get, but I did have the thought that she'd hitched up her wagon to the wrong horse maybe.
So blah blah blah, cross your fingers hope nobody takes him skill size patience, blah blah blah, but if they do this instead of the sensible step of returning one of the AHL callups back to Laval, it speaks volume that they pretty much prefer a clean break, no? That they hope someone takes this contract and failed pick off their hands and be done with it and move on to other things?
The rumour at the 2014 Draft was that the Canadiens really wanted David Pastrnak, missing vowel and all, that he was the next guy on Trevor Timmins' list, and they were deflated when he got picked by the Bruins one selection before ours, and that Nikita was a plan B pick, the other, lesser option if you look to add a talented winger-scorer to your prospect pool. At that point, I set up a mental comparable in my mind, kind of like I did with Noah Juulsen and Jérémy Roy, where I'd evaluate Nikita's progress through the prism of the Dirty Bruins' player. It hasn't gone well so far.
So Nikita Scherbak is claimed by the Los Angeles Kings. The very first team in waiver-order priority snatched him up, and we'll never know how many other teams put in a claim and were ready and willing to accommodate him on their 23-player roster. Yet I was told by the Canadiens' press flacks that Marc Bergevin had been burning up the phone lines trying to trade him, with no takers. I scoff at this.
The Canadiens, with a very shallow prospect pool, and a very disappointing AHL farm team for years now, instead of hoarding somehow bleed prospects like you wouldn't believe. My offhand list of recent losses:
Mike Condon
Mark Barberio
Brandon Davidson
Jacob de la Rose
Nikita Scherbak
Please correct me and add to the list if I've forgotten anyone that was sloughed off recently.
I'll bring up the bungled cases of Sven Andrighetto and Jarred Tinordi, as waiver-wire-adjacent losses, players that got squeezed out and brought back precious little in return, but if I'm being consistent, I can't really fault the Canadiens brass for. They actually traded them for something, instead of outright losing them on waivers, as little as that something was. That's clearly what I advocate for. I just wish that the timing, the juggling had been done better, more expertly, that the trigger had been pulled at the right time.
But yeah, another former first-rounder, another prospect cremated by our organization, instead of being a Rafaël Diaz-like heap of slag transmuted into a Dale Weise. That list is much too long, in a mere three seasons.
And I'll often hear or read "Well, Mike Condon sucked, it's no big loss, we couldn't keep him and Carey Price and Charlie Lindgren...", and that's entirely missing the point. I'm not saying that Mike Condon was about to win the Vézina Trophy, just that he held some value that we didn't realize, we didn't cash in on, but the Penguins did, when they traded Mike after a mere month or so for a fifth-round pick to the Senators.
Some will shrug and say "Win some, lose some...", and point to Paul Byron as a huge win that cancels out the losses, but I'll reply to that that you don't win a Stanley Cup by staying even, by holding a .500 record. You have to pile up the wins.
Marc Bergevin, when questioned by a journo last year about Brandon Davidson, who he'd lost on waivers to Edmonton, who then in turn flipped him to the Islanders a few weeks later for a third-round pick, had dismissed this as an artifact of timing, that when he waived him there had been no demand on the trade market for his services, but later on nearer the trade deadline, with injuries piling up on various rosters, now there was. Which to me is not an explanation or excuse but rather a smoking gun, an inculpatory statement. Of course timing was a factor, and of course we should have used timing to our advantage, it's not something we should figure out in the post-mortem, in hindsight, it was plainly written in the stars at the time.
If you sell your car in the spring and now have a set of winter tires, barely used, that you don't need anymore, you don't ask around a couple times, fail to find a buyer, give up, and take them to the dump. You use time to your advantage, you adapt, you stash the tires in the garage, in your basement, in your shed, in the backyard under a tarp, anywhere really, and wait it out until September and then hit Kijiji and Craig's List and now you get $150 back for your troubles, that's working-class dirtbag 101. And that's our social status right now, we're not Nouveau Riche or aristocracy, we're on the welfare rolls, or barely off them, in terms of our talent futures. We can't turn up our nose at the cost of an ugly tarp in our backyard, not for $150. That'll buy a lot of no-name brand spaghetti.
I'll repeat that I'd understand how, if we were the Nashville Predators or the Tampa Bay Lightning, a stacked team and organization replete with prospects and young players and draft picks and an AHL team running rampant, that with the limits imposed by the salary cap and the 23-player roster and the waiver rules and the expansion draft and the 50-contract limit, that you can only juggle and contort yourself in so many ways until at some point, a Teuvo Teravainen or a Jonathan Drouin must be dumped, a Calvin Pickard and Curtis McElhinney shake loose.
We are not in that situation though. We are not a powerhouse chock-full of prospects and phenoms. We don't have a huge pile of poker chips stacked in front of us with which to wheel and deal. We should be trying to scratch and claw and amass these chips. If we drop a dollar chip off the table onto the floor, we're not in a position to let it be, we need that dollar, we bend down and pick it up. That'll be our ante in a couple of hands.
Do I think Nikita Scherbak is a world-beater who will scored hundreds of goals in the NHL? Do I disagree with the Canadiens development staff who have the vantage point to evaluate him, fault him for his lack of focus, his poor conditioning a few seasons back? Do I disagree with Claude Julien's decision-making to make him a healthy-scratch in every game so far this season? Not individually, no, but the sum total of these little decisions and evaluations add up to another squandered asset, another player we with faint hubris ended up walking away from, instead of biding our time, like Brian Burke with Tomas Kaberle, letting him dangle for seasons on end until he got the price he wanted. Like Joe Sakic with a malingering Matt Duchene. Like the previous incarnation of Marc Bergevin, taking a depreciating Sebastian Collberg and packaging him in the nick of time with a second-rounder to land a couple months' worth of Thomas Vanek and a better chance at a deep playoff run.
Because it's not like we had no other option. Again, like last season when we burnt Brandon Davidson on waivers, when Noah Juulsen and Victor Mete were available to send down to Laval for a couple weeks without need of waivers, like when Jacob de la Rose walked the plank while Tomas Plekanec was spared, we had other less costly options this time around. Michael Chaput and Kenny Agostino are on the roster, were callups from the Rocket, and would have probably sailed through waivers back to Laval. Their being claimed would have been a negligible impact, you get those guys for free every August, to pad your AHL roster.
But no,
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