- Montreal led the NHL in man-games lost in 2022-23 before tearing up its medical department
- Jim Ramsay arrived from the Rangers in June 2023 and told players to stop grinding through injuries
- Read below for what changed in the Canadiens training room and who runs it now
Lane Hutson, Ivan Demidov and Juraj Slafkovsky get the credit for dragging the Canadiens out of their rebuild. A hire from June 2023 that barely made the news cycle deserves a share of it.
A reader asked Arpon Basu of The Athletic on Wednesday why Montreal stopped bleeding man-games. His answer started with head athletic trainer Jim Ramsay.
The before picture was grim. Montreal lost more man-games to injury than any team in the league in 2022-23, the first full season under Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes.
Cole Caufield, Slafkovsky, Sean Monahan, Kirby Dach, Christian Dvorak, Josh Anderson, Joel Armia, Kaiden Guhle, Mike Matheson, David Savard and Arber Xhekaj all missed long stretches that year. Only Nick Suzuki and Johnathan Kovacevic dressed for more than 70 games.
Man-Games Lost NHL, an account that tracks this stuff league-wide, broke its own rule about naming teams that January:
Ramsay replaced Graham Rynbend that June, weeks after the Rangers cut him loose following 28 years in New York. Gorton knew him from running that front office, and Martin St. Louis played for him.
Trainers almost never move the needle publicly, which is why the reaction to this one stood out:
Basu was asked what actually changed once Ramsay walked in. Injuries in Montreal used to drag on well past whatever timeline the team put out, and that stopped. Players got recovery dates that were “almost always accurate,” and Ramsay “strongly discouraged players from playing through injuries,” especially back when the games meant nothing in the standings.
Above Ramsay, the rest of the department turned over as well. Dr. David Mulder retired that same offseason after 60 years with the organization, Dr. Dan Deckelbaum took the head physician job, and Dr. Thierry Pauyo holds it now.
Pauyo played four years of hockey at Amherst College, graduated with honours from Harvard Medical School and did his residency at McGill. Injury prevention is his research specialty.
He laid out that thinking in a long French-language interview, comparing the work to a man who keeps pulling people out of a river without ever asking why they fall in. Check out the full sit-down:
Montreal reached the Eastern Conference Final last spring with one of the youngest rosters in hockey. The same mailbag confirmed the Canadiens are still fielding calls on defenseman Adam Engstrom as they hunt a top-six forward.
Camp opens in under a month and that forward still is not on the roster. The change that got the Canadiens this far never showed up in a transaction log.
