The Montreal Canadiens entered the 2019 offseason with a bundle of cap space and a team that was not quite good enough to make the 2019 postseason. They added even more cap space by trading away Nicolas Deslauriers and Andrew Shaw for draft picks on June 30th, just hours before free agency officially began.
Bergevin was finally going to use all that cap space to make a big splash and make his team much better, or so we thought. He didn’t. He tried to use it to acquire Sebastian Aho from the Carolina Hurricanes via an offer sheet, but the Hurricanes eventually matched the offer and kept their star player.