Patrik Laine's return likely to be with a brand new team.

The Montreal Canadiens may be done with veteran National Hockey League forward Patrik Laine.

Laine has appeared in just 5 games for the Canadiens this season, sidelined for the majority of the season due to undergoing surgery to repair a core muscle, and, although he is set to return at some point during the 2025-26 NHL regular season, it sounds like Laine might have to do his returning somewhere else.

In a recent article, Canadiens insider Eric Engels strongly hinted at the possibility that the Canadiens will look to move on from Laine sooner rather than later.

"If you look at our roster, I think it’s pretty clear we have extra guys," said Canadiens executive VP Jeff Gorton as per Engels. "I do think adding some of the guys we added got us through the time we were pretty banged up, so we had some depth that kept us above water and kept us playing pretty good hockey when in years past we probably would’ve caved in."

His team has played very well this season however and has done so with Laine out of the lineup entirely. That makes it easy to see why the Canadiens would be looking to shed Laine's cap hit from their books, and it sounds like they may be willing to bend over backwards to make it happen.

According to Engels, the Canadiens are prepared to retain the maximum amount of retention on Laine's current deal in order to shed his cap hit, although he also specified that the Canadiens would not be willing to give up any assets in order to do so.

Laine is in the final year of a 4 year deal with a cap hit and average annual value of $8.7 million per season, but if you were to cut that number in half I could certainly see him becoming a more interesting option for rival teams.

Whether or not the Canadiens will be able to pull this off when the roster freeze lifts after the Olympic Games remains to be seen.