Don’t look for a hotel room for your vacation in Brossard; they will be monopolized by the Canadian.
Posted at 6:08 p.m.
The Habs unveiled their roster for training camp on Tuesday, and there will be hockey players per square metre. The team has indeed invited 74 players for the exercise.
There will be 43 attackers, 20 defenders and eight goalkeepers. But three players are missing, you will rightly protest. These are three players identified as surplus (“extra”): Carey Price, Paul Byron and Logan Mailloux.
The former is unlikely to play this season. Byron is expected to return early in the season, Kent Hughes said last week, while Mailloux took part in Tuesday’s practice at rookie camp. He was doing it with a blue vest, however, suggesting he can’t take hits.
Mailloux is recovering from shoulder surgery.
This means that Jonathan Drouin and Sean Monahan, two forwards whose presence at the start of the season was uncertain, are listed in the same list as players deemed healthy.
Note that forwards Pierrick Dubé and John Parker-Jones, as well as goalkeepers Antoine Coulombe and Riley Mercer, have received an invitation to the camp. These four undrafted players were participating this weekend in the rookie tournament by virtue of an invitation and therefore showed enough to have their tryouts extended.
The 74 players constitute a team record for the start of the camp, in living memory. For comparison, there were 70 last year, 42 the previous season (in the midst of the pandemic), 57 in 2019-2020, 66 in 2018-2019 and 61 in 2017-2018.
The camp will begin with the medical exams on Wednesday, and the first on-ice sessions will take place on Thursday. Note that the traditional intersquad game between the Reds and the Whites will take place on Sunday afternoon at the Bell Centre.