The Montreal Canadiens have signed veteran winger Chris Kreider to a one-year contract for 2026-27, reportedly worth $2.15 million guaranteed with up to $3.25 million more available in performance bonuses.

Kreider, 35, hit the open market after a mutual contract termination with the Anaheim Ducks, where he’d just spent one season: 75 games, 22 goals, 50 points, plus 2 goals and 7 points in 12 playoff games. Eight of those goals and 17 of those points came on the power play alone — over a third of his production — which says plenty about the kind of net-front trigger he still is at 35. That’s still a real NHL scorer at a bargain price: Kreider has scored 20-plus goals in eight straight seasons, topped out at 52 goals and 77 points in 2021-22, and sits 15th all-time in NHL goals and 10th all-time in power-play goals (124 for his career). Over 958 career games with the Rangers and Ducks, he’s put up 348 goals and 632 points.

According to Pierre LeBrun, the decision came down to three teams, and Kreider chose Montreal largely because of his comfort with head coach Martin St. Louis and his existing relationship with hockey ops president Jeff Gorton from their years together with the Rangers — along with wanting to be back on the East Coast, closer to family, after Anaheim didn’t work out.

Worth remembering here: Montreal went into this offseason with roughly $9.8 million in cap space, and that number was already earmarked before a dime went to Kreider — Zachary Bolduc and Arber Xhekaj are both still unsigned restricted free agents, and their new contracts come out of that space first. Kreider’s $2.15 million base takes a real chunk out of it, leaving the Canadiens with somewhere around $7.6 million before Bolduc and Xhekaj even get paid. This wasn’t free money sitting around; it’s Hughes making a bet that a bargain winger was worth spending it on now.

Here’s the part Habs fans won’t be able to ignore: Kreider is the same player who ran Carey Price in Game 1 of the 2014 Eastern Conference Final, a hit that ended Price’s playoffs and, for a lot of people who lived through that spring, ended Montreal’s best shot at a Cup run in over a decade. New York won that series in six games. Whatever value this signing brings on the ice, plenty of you are going to need a minute with this one, and that’s fair.

There’s an even older wrinkle to this story. Back in 2009, Montreal actually had a shot at drafting Kreider themselves — the Rangers took him 19th overall, one pick after Bob Gainey used Montreal’s own first-rounder on Louis Leblanc. Leblanc was a legitimate prospect at the time, the reigning USHL and Ivy League Rookie of the Year, but his NHL career never got going: 50 games, 10 points, done in the league by 25. Seventeen years later, the player Montreal passed on is signing here anyway — as a bargain-bin free agent instead of the franchise cornerstone he might have been.

For now, expect Kreider to slot in as a secondary scoring winger and veteran presence somewhere in Montreal’s top nine. And for what it’s worth, this is close to exactly the kind of move we talked about a few days ago: instead of giving up an asset to force a trade for a Marchenko or a Knies, Kent Hughes found a 20-goal scorer in free agency for pocket change. It won’t make the history with Price disappear, but on pure value, it’s hard to call this one a bad piece of business.