Arber Xhekaj found himself the unlikely centerpiece of a hockey debate this week, one that pulled in some of the biggest names in Montreal Canadiens history and delivered a blunt message straight to the front office.
A group of former Canadiens champions gathered at the Mirage earlier this week, and one topic kept returning: toughness, or the lack of it on the current roster. Serge Savard, Larry Robinson and Patrick Roy were in the room. So was Jean Perron, the coach who guided the franchise to the 1986 Stanley Cup.
Perron later shared a pointed exchange with reporters. Savard, he said, kept asking why Xhekaj isn’t playing more. “They have an extraordinary team, but two of their best players are five foot six or seven,” Perron recalled Savard saying. “They’ll need to be protected, or they’re going to get hammered out there.”
The assessment is blunt. It comes from a Hall of Fame defenseman who won eight Stanley Cups wearing the same sweater.
Lane Hutson produced 78 points in 82 games this season—elite production for a defenseman of his size. Cole Caufield scored 51 goals and finished with 88 points. Ivan Demidov added 62 points as a rookie winger. None of them is physically imposing. That is the concern the legends kept circling back to.
Larry Robinson, whose name still sits atop several franchise defensive records that Hutson is chasing, put it plainly. “I love watching Hutson play, he’s so smart out there,” Robinson said. “As long as he keeps using his head and avoids getting flattened by the giants in this league, I expect him to do just fine.”
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Savard went further, comparing the current core to the 1986 champions he helped build. That group, he said, had more snarl. “Your best player, nobody gets to try and demolish him,” Savard said. “We had that. I’m not sure this group does, outside of one guy.”
That one guy is Xhekaj. He carried a cap hit of just $1.3 million—remarkably cheap for a player these franchise icons view as essential insurance. His own numbers will not turn heads: four points in 65 games and a minus-8 rating. But that was never the point of the conversation.
The question now is whether toughness is something a group can will into existence or whether it is simply a personnel problem waiting on a trade. Kent Hughes has heard the message, loud and clear.
Montreal finished 48-24-10 for 106 points, sixth overall in the league, and went 7-3-0 over its final 10 games. The results are there. The armor, according to these four men, still is not.
Adding grit before a real Cup push is no longer a nice-to-have. It is starting to sound like the missing piece these franchise icons will not stop pointing at.