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General manager Marc Bergevin said this week the answer to the Canadiens’ problems is in the locker room.

Maybe if the GM looks around the room long enough he can find the roughly $8.5 million in salary-cap money he didn’t spend this summer to help improve his team.

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It’s hard to believe the NHL’s second-most valuable franchise with a record 24 Stanley Cups — the Canadiens were evaluated at $1.12 billion last year by Forbes, trailing only the New York Rangers at $1.25 billion — wouldn’t spend close to the $75-million cap limit. But that didn’t happen after Bergevin failed to re-sign free-agents Andrei Markov and Alexander Radulov this summer and didn’t seem to have a Plan B in place. Or at least not one that would work.

Bergevin said he “kicked tires” on a lot of free agents this summer and made some “really, really good offers,” but the players decided they didn’t want to come to Montreal “for whatever reason.” That left the dapper GM with a lot of money sitting in his pockets.