The Montreal Canadiens signed forward Alexandre Texier to a one-year contract worth $1 million on Sunday. Texier\u2019s contract was terminated by the St. Louis Blues after he cleared waivers Sunday.<\/p>\n
Texier has 40 goals and 51 assists in 240 career NHL games for the Blues and Columbus Blue Jackets. His speed should be appealing to a Canadiens team that has lost a lot of depth at forward to injuries.<\/p>\n
Injuries to Patrik Laine, Alex Newhook and Kirby Dach have forced the Canadiens to rely on AHL callups Jared Davidson, Joshua Roy and most recently Florian Xhekaj.<\/p>\n
The addition of Texier will cost one of those call-ups a spot in the lineup, and it remains to be seen if that\u2019s a positive or not. The fact the Blues could not find a spot for him is a bit of a red flag, but there is no doubt the Canadiens have a need for bodies up front with NHL experience.<\/p>\n
However, Texier does not have much of a track record on special teams and, as a depth player, does not have much of a history of a 200-foot game, which is seemingly what the Canadiens require further down the lineup.\u00a0\u2014 Arpon Basu<\/p>\n
What happened with the Blues?<\/p>\n
The Blues acquired Texier in a trade with Columbus in June 2024 and immediately signed him to a two-year, $4.2 million contract. But in 1 1\/2 seasons, he played just 39 games with the club: 31 in 2024-25 and eight this season.<\/p>\n
Texier, who plays both wing and center, flashed what Blues coach Jim Montgomery labeled \u201celite\u201d skill during his stay in St. Louis, but he was inconsistent. He couldn\u2019t win a vacancy on the third line after the team traded Zack Bolduc to Montreal this offseason, and thus he only got into eight of 20 games before he was placed on waivers.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor Tex, he\u2019s an outstanding young man and just didn\u2019t find any kind of path this year to consistently stay in the lineup,\u201d Montgomery said.<\/p>\n
The Blues placed Texier on regular waivers last week, and if claimed, teams would\u2019ve been on the hook for the remainder of his $2.1 million salary this season. Instead, he cleared and was assigned to the AHL\u2019s Springfield Thunderbirds.<\/p>\n
Saturday, Texier was placed on unconditional waivers with the purpose of terminating his contract. He walked away from the final year of his contract with the Blues in order to pursue further NHL opportunities with the Canadiens. \u2014\u00a0Jeremy Rutherford<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Montreal Canadiens signed forward Alexandre Texier to a one-year contract worth $1 million on Sunday. Texier\u2019s contract…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":400839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[3104,293,62,2996,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-400838","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-montreal-canadiens","9":"tag-nhl","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-st-louis-blues","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115603459731397036","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}