Paying 6.5 million for a guy who was a healthy scratch in the playoffs and using a 3rd line centre for the top line gets you in the playoffs?

Perron made 66 pts in 70 games last season
Brassard : being behind two of the best centers of the league is not too bad haha. Even O'Reilly would be a third line center in PIT.
Klefbom : MTL has now a young good D to play with Weber

Still that puts the Canadiens well behind the big 3 in the Atlantic and I'd put Florida ahead of them as well. It's going to be really hard to match Tampa, Boston and Toronto who all have way better depth upfront.

I didn'y say it would be easy haha

I dream of a time when both TO and Montreal are both good and fighting in the playoffs. Unfortunately I just don't see it happening from Montreal for a long time. I've said it for a couple of seasons that they should do a rebuild. They are old and not good enough currently and that'll get worse the older they get.

Come on Habs, be really bad and get Hughes.

The average age (26.6) is the same as the Capitals(26.8), so they're not "too old". Maybe Weber but he still has few years left.
They should only trade Weber & Pacio, not doing a full Rebuild. But they don't act that way.

So in Bergevin's perspective to make playoff, I think that these trades ideas are good enough to give MTL a chance to go in playoff.

Although Klefbom is great, why would we trade Patches for him when we can try to sign De Haan? Imo, despite the slight age difference, same type of player and production. Then we use Patches in another trade. Also, Lehkonen has more value to the team than getting Brassard and trying to make him play first line minutes.. that doesn't work. You're falling into the same habit the Habs always have done; playing players on lines higher than they can handle. Let's just rebuild and not trade away any of our young guys

De Haan isn't anything special. FA's are always over paid.