LOS ANGELES — With just under 14 minutes to play in a game the Canadiens were losing 3-0, Gustav Lindstrom and Kaiden Guhle exchanged six consecutive passes behind their own goal line, each of them searching for a breakout option that never presented itself to them.
That’s when they coughed up the puck to the Kings for yet another quality scoring chance against.
It was the Kings’ fourth in a two-minute span, which is about what they averaged throughout the third period as they swarmed the Canadiens and stung them over and over again.
When the puck got out of Montreal’s zone, back it came, usually on an odd-man rush like the one Trevor Moore scored on to make it 4-0 Kings with 6:32 remaining.
That, of course, was after the Kings had already broken the Canadiens’ will with the cat-and-mouse style that comes from the one-three-one neutral-zone scheme they deploy when leading. They first pressed the Canadiens — and not just up against the glass — with an aggressive forecheck to get a lead, and then they got that lead, sat back and, as Mike Matheson put it afterwards, forced them to “play in a way that we don’t like to.”
Every teammate of Matheson’s we spoke to praised the 13-3-3 Kings, with goaltender Jake Allen referring to them as the most unified team in the NHL and Brendan Gallagher calling them “really hard to play against.”
They made the Canadiens hard to watch.
But the Kings also served up a template for the Canadiens to follow.
When we asked coach Martin St. Louis what they should take from this game, he decided to answer that there was something they should take from the Kings.
“I think, if anything, that offensive pace they play with, in terms of getting pucks back in our d-zone when they lose the puck, they’re hunting to get it back and there’s not much room,” St. Louis said.
He knows the Canadiens understand that’s the goal. He says all the time they should be committed to defending as soon as they lose the puck, that defence doesn’t begin in their own zone.
But St. Louis and the Canadiens also know they don’t have the pieces the Kings do — three world-class centres in Anze Kopitar, Phillip Danault and Pierre-Luc Dubois with size and strength on the wings and on defence — nor the experience to execute it as regularly.
Not that they won’t strive to.
“You can’t generate that without everybody working hard off the puck and everybody having some pace to their game,” St. Louis said. “That’s what we’re chasing. That’s what we want to look like in getting pucks back. When we do that, we’re hard to play against. We’ve just got to find more consistency in playing with that pace when we lose pucks.”
It’ll take time, even if the Canadiens can improve on it over the final 61 games of the season.
A healthy Kirby Dach will help next go around. Other additions made over the off-season will lead to more growth.
In the meantime, it was good for the Canadiens to see that style of play work so well from up close. Even if it was painful and frustrating for them to be the victim of it.
“We didn’t play a bad game,” St. Louis said. “They’re a team that forces you to really earn all your chances. They bring so much pace defensively. We were able to break that a bit in the second. It would’ve been fun to score then. We were there, but once they score the third, that changes everything.”
That’s when the Canadiens began chasing — and leaking — chances.
They’ll face the Kings again Dec. 7. They’ll face other teams who play similarly. They’ll have to borrow from L.A.’s style, but also make the adjustments that would’ve enabled them to break it a little.
“I think you have to bring speed and be very connected and be coming together,” said Matheson, who like Guhle and Lindstrom late in the game, spent a lot of his night looking for breakout options that weren’t available to him.
“I thought we did a good job of bringing speed and being connected a few times,” Matheson said, “and at other times one guy might have gone a little early, one guy might have come a little late off the bench or we were maybe getting antsy and impatient. When a team does that as well as they do in the neutral zone, you have to be very, very connected.”
If you’re not, you end up with just one shot on net in a period, like the Canadiens did in the first.
If you can’t capitalize on the chances you create in the second period and end up chasing a two-goal lead in the third, a team like the Kings will feast on the mistakes you become more prone to making.
There isn’t much else you can do from there, except learn from it and move on.
