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FILE – Montreal Canadiens head coach Martin St Louis speaks at a news conference following Game 2 of the Eastern Conference final NHL hockey Stanley Cup playoff series against the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh, N.C., Saturday, May 23, 2026.<\/p>\n
Karl B DeBlaker\/AP Photo\/Karl B DeBlaker<\/p>\n
FILE – Anaheim Ducks left wing Chris Kreider skates during an NHL hockey game against the Seattle Kraken, Feb. 3, 2026, in Anaheim, Calif.<\/p>\n
Kyusung Gong\/AP Photo\/Kyusung Gong<\/p>\n
LAVAL, Quebec (AP) \u2014 The Montreal Canadiens have signed coach Martin St. Louis to a multiyear extension.<\/p>\n
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The team announced the deal Monday without revealing how long St. Louis is now under contract.<\/p>\n
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St. Louis, 51, has guided the upstart Canadiens to consecutive playoff berths, including a trip last year\u2019s Eastern Conference final, after beginning his tenure during a full-scale rebuild.<\/p>\n
Montreal hired St. Louis in on an interim basis following Dominique Ducharme\u2019s dismissal in February 2022, taking on his first-ever role behind an NHL bench after previously coaching at the youth level.<\/p>\n
A Hall of Fame winger as a player, he had the interim tag removed at the end of that season.<\/p>\n
St. Louis has a 163-155-47 record entering his sixth season as Canadiens coach. He was a finalist for the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year in 2025, after leading the Canadiens to the playoffs for the first time since the 2020-21 season. Montreal, at the time the youngest team in the league, was eliminated in the first round by the Washington Capitals.<\/p>\n
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\u201cMarty has done a terrific job leading our young team,\u201d Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes said in a statement. \u201cHe is a great communicator and teacher. We look forward to his continued efforts to mold this group into a championship-caliber team.\u201d<\/p>\n Inducted to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2018, St. Louis totaled 1,033 points before retiring in 2015.<\/p>\n His most decorated season was in 2003-04, when he won the Hart Trophy as league MVP, the Art Ross trophy as leading scorer with 94 points and helped the Tampa Bay Lightning win the Stanley Cup.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Chris Kreider joins the Canadiens after being a Montreal villain<\/p>\n Chris Kreider has skated onto the Bell Centre ice to a chorus of boos for most of his career. That, he hopes, is about to change after signing a one-year contract with the Canadiens on Saturday.<\/p>\n \u201cPretty amazing, pretty iconic logo,\u201d Kreider said Monday as he walked to the podium with the Canadiens\u2019 crest stitched on his chest at Montreal’s season-opening golf tournament. It\u2019s not just a sport here. It\u2019s a religion.\u201d<\/p>\n Kreider has been on the receiving end of that fervor for more than a decade, gaining villain status in 2014 when the then-New York Rangers winger crashed into Carey Price and knocked the star goalie out of the Eastern Conference final.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Montreal\u2019s fury, however, never gave Kreider pause when the Canadiens came calling aggressively with an offer, after he agreed to mutually terminate his contract with salary cap-strapped Anaheim to move back East, closer to family.<\/p>\n \u201cMontreal was pretty aggressive right out of the gate, and obviously there\u2019s several connections to my time spent in New York, so there\u2019s a familiarity there,\u201d Kreider said, before listing more reasons for his signing. \u201cEverything that they\u2019re doing here and have been doing for a few years now, the culture that they\u2019ve built, the group that they have.\u201d<\/p>\n St. Louis being behind the bench was a big influence. He and Kreider played together on the same line more than a decade ago with the Rangers<\/p>\n \u201cSuper wise, incredibly smart,\u201d Kreider said. \u201cI don\u2019t think I can say that I\u2019ve learned more from any one individual than the time that I spent playing with him on his line.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n St. Louis, meanwhile, will coach a former teammate for the first time. He said he\u2019s glad it\u2019s Kreider.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me it\u2019s simple,\u201d St. Louis said. \u201cYou look at our club, what do we need? Well, we need probably a little more experience; he checks that box. We need a little more sandpaper, checks that box. Net-front guy, checks that box.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n See AP\u2019s full NHL coverage here<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FILE – Montreal Canadiens head coach Martin St Louis speaks at a news conference following Game 2 of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662533,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5103],"tags":[265,71923,2268,1542,41196,5,1749,412,264,21,5147,4,3494,3492,534],"class_list":["post-662742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-montreal-canadiens","tag-canadiens","tag-canadiens-martin-st-louis-extension","tag-carey-price","tag-chris-kreider","tag-dominique-ducharme","tag-hockey","tag-kent-hughes","tag-martin-st-louis","tag-montreal","tag-montreal-canadiens","tag-montrealcanadiens","tag-nhl","tag-package-100502-member-choice-sports-option","tag-product-30599-ap-sports-news-s-wire-only","tag-st-louis"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/117273629116938704","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>
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