With Chicago Blackhawks forward Frank Nazar’s emergence, it’s natural for Montreal Canadiens fans to suffer buyer’s remorse regarding Kirby Dach, especially with the two teams having just faced each other (albeit over three years after the Habs used the former’s draft rights to acquire Dach). However, if it’s any consolation, there are no guarantees the Habs would even have taken Nazar with the 13th overall pick they got from the New York Islanders at the 2022 NHL Entry Draft for Alexander Romanov and a fourth-round pick.
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It’s true that the Canadiens needed a second-line centre when general manager Kent Hughes made the now-controversial call to trade Nazar’s trade rights (along with a 2022 third-round pick used to take Gavin Hayes) for Dach in 2022, a role Nazar would conceivably fill with greater efficiency than Dach right now. After all, Nazar is coming off a successful rookie season in which he scored 26 points in 53 games, with five so far after three games in 2025-26.
However, it’s worth noting Dach had a hugely successful first season with the Habs in 2022-23, during which he scored 38 points in 58 games. At the time of the trade, Dach was also seen as a still-young former third-overall pick (2019) with immense potential that he began to live up to with the Habs. It’s obviously impossible to know, but the argument is, had his career not been derailed by two straight season-ending knee injuries in 2024 and 2025, everyone in Montreal would still be celebrating the trade instead of lamenting it.
Impossible to Say Canadiens Would Have Taken Nazar
The key word is “impossible.” It was impossible to say at the time Dach would suffer as many serious injuries as he has. As alluded to earlier, it’s also impossible to say the Canadiens would have taken Nazar, even as another centre, based on the discrepancies in size between him (5-9, 190 pounds) and Dach (6-4, 221 pounds). It’s hardly a case of one or the other, especially when Hughes has famously gone on record as saying, “There’s not a 5-foot-9 hockey player that scares me, but 22 of them would scare me (from ‘Stu Cowan: Canadiens GM Kent Hughes puts his plan into action,’ Montreal Gazette, July 8, 2022).
In fact, with Hughes having targeted the fellow-5-foot-10 Filip Mesar, first-overall-pick Juraj Slafkovsky’s friend, with their next pick that round, it’s arguably even less likely they would have taken Nazar. Considering one of the points in acquiring Dach seemed to be to get someone to jump right into the lineup, Nazar wouldn’t have been the logical selection. And, based on the fact the Canadiens had been talking with the Blackhawks about Dach for a few weeks leading up to the trade, based on what Hughes has said on the matter, the logical deduction is he was their guy for all intents and purposes. If not the first-round pick, the Habs hypothetically would have found another way to acquire him as the guy they envisioned as their second-line centre of the future and moved on from filling that hole in their lineup, ultimately still logically picking someone else other than Nazar at No. 13.
In retrospect, obviously the Canadiens would prefer to have picked Nazar. However, the reasoning behind the trade was sound, as they were acquiring a proven NHL player just approaching the prime years of his career. It’s hardly a case of mortgaging one’s future by trading away draft picks for a rental at the trade deadline. Hughes was building for the future at the time, and, even three years later, Habs fans have yet to seem him make moves with purely short-term gains in the standings in mind with any kind of a regularity.
Critics may point to the Noah Dobson trade as proof to the contrary. However, securing a 25-year-old, arguably top-pairing right-handed defenseman through the prime years of his career to fill a pressing need is all kinds of justifiable… and similar to what Hughes was clearly trying to accomplish when he got Dach as his second-line centre of the future. And, for a time, it looked like it had worked as planned, but, obviously, things took a turn for the worse.
Canadiens Lose Dach Trade but Win Overall
Sure, the Dach trade was a gamble, but, whenever you make a draft pick, you’re gambling too. In acquiring Dach, they simply felt like they were gambling with better odds, having much more information regarding his capabilities. Like any bet, sometimes it doesn’t work out, but, considering where the Habs are now in their rebuild, coming off an impressive 2024-25 in which they made the postseason earlier than anticipated, it’s more fair than not to say Hughes his doing his job well. He won’t win every trade, but, for every disappointing Dach, there’s a Zachary Bolduc, who has exceeded expectations.
All things taken into account, the Canadiens are coming out ahead following the Dach trade, just not with specific regard to that one move. Things can still turn around for Dach, as much as it may seem as though anyone making the argument is grasping at straws to call the trade a win, but the thing is Hughes himself doesn’t need to call it a win, because it’s not like he’s searching far and wide for moral victories to justify his position at the head of the organization. The Habs themselves are winning outright on the strength of his management, albeit with just three of 82 games played in 2025-26.
It would be disingenuous to suggest the Canadiens are anything other than a team on the rise. While Nazar would realistically help them reach new heights were he to be plugged into the lineup right now, that’s just not how things work. Dreaming of changing the course of history by going back in time and making one small change for the better wouldn’t necessarily equate to a better team overall. So, you take the bad with the good, which, not for nothing, vastly outweighs the bad at this juncture. Based on where the Habs were at the time of the trade, coming off a dead-last-place season, that in and of itself is a huge win.
