The Habs made a pair of additions to their front office on Friday, hiring Vincent Lecavalier as special advisor to hockey operations while Nick Bobrov has been appointed as co-director of amateur scouting.
Lecavalier has been speculatively linked to Montreal since Kent Hughes was named GM. Lecavalier was Hughes’ client so the connection was pretty obvious. The 41-year-old hung up his skates in 2016 and hasn’t worked in the NHL since then so this is likely to be an entry-level advisor role.
As for Bobrov, he’s the first significant addition to Montreal’s scouting department under this new regime. The job title is interesting in that he’ll share the role with Martin Lapointe, someone who has a lot of different roles in the organization as it is. Clearly, Hughes and Jeff Gorton have a lot of faith in Lapointe being able to handle that role so the solution to filling Trevor Timmins’ shoes may be with a two-person approach in Bobrov and Lapointe.
Bobrov has served as the European scouting director for both the Bruins and Rangers in the past and has extensive experience working alongside Gorton. New York, in particular, has drafted several European players early in recent drafts with varying degrees of success. That list includes Kaapo Kakko, Lias Andersson, Vitali Kravtsov, Nils Lundkvist, and Filip Chytil who were all first-round picks between 2017 and 2019.