We got some very bad news on Saturday morning when the Montreal Canadiens announced that forward Cole Caufield would be out for the remainder of the season with a right shoulder injury.

However, Caufield’s agent Pat Brisson was confident about his client’s future during an exclusive interview with TVA Sports earlier in the evening.

“It’s been two or three months since he had an injury that was tiring him out and that meant he wasn’t at 100%,” he explained first. We had several talks and we did several tests with doctors… he could have continued playing but it was risky because he could have worsened his injury if he fell in the wrong direction. So, as a team with the Canadians, we made the decision to go in that direction to protect Cole’s future. [l’opération].

“It’s an accumulation, it’s happened a couple of times that his shoulder has landed. In his case it didn’t hurt too much but we wanted to prevent it so it doesn’t get worse and he misses the start of next season. We are 100% and 99.9% respectively confident that the operation will go well and he can come back for the training camp next year.

General manager Kent Hughes mentioned earlier this week that he was negotiating a long-term agreement with the Caufield clan. Does this operation change the situation in this file?

“We had a lot of talks for about a month and it was very positive,” said Brisson. The Canadians have made it very clear that they will work with us to sign a contract extension [malgré l’opération].”

Head coach Martin St-Louis admitted on Saturday the hardest thing to replace in Caufield’s absence will not be his performance but his enthusiasm. On that note, Brisson admits it was difficult to convince him to go under the knife.

“He was so positive that he needed to be brought up,” Brisson said. He wanted to play, he didn’t feel so bad. But then he understood [les complications possibles]. He wasn’t proud to stop, his little smile was less smiling than people say!

Watch the full interview with Pat Brisson in the video above.