MONTREAL — Remember when these Montreal Canadiens leaked so many chances from October through mid-November that the idea of them being near the playoff picture come January, never mind being up against it in mid-March, seemed unfathomable?
It wasn’t that long ago, but it feels like a distant memory now. Especially with the Canadiens playing the way they have since returning from the 4 Nations Face-Off break.
They remain on the playoff bubble — sitting just one point behind the New York Rangers, who occupy the second wild-card position in the Eastern Conference — but they’ve looked like a playoff team over these 10 games.
The Canadiens have allowed more than three goals in only one of those games, and they gave up only one to the reigning Stanley Cup-champion Florida Panthers on Saturday.
You know what the Canadiens didn’t give the Panthers at five-on-five? Grade-A scoring chances.
This Florida team creates them more frequently than three quarters of the teams in the league. It ranks sixth in shots per game at five-on-five (30.4).
But the Canadiens held the Panthers to less than a handful of quality looks and just 15 shots at five-on-five (according to naturalstattrick.com) to earn a 3-1 win that typified just how far they’ve come since mid-November, when they were in last place in the standings.
“We didn’t have any passengers tonight,” said coach Martin St. Louis.
His Canadiens held the rudder particularly steady in the third period, as the wave rose and fell all around them for 10 straight minutes after Christian Dvorak restored their two-goal lead.
Fans at Bell Centre were up and down from their seats belting out full-throated Ole, Ole, Ole chants as the team on the ice locked the rest of the game down by killing a Dvorak penalty and a six-on-five Panthers advantage.
It was a playoff performance in a playoff atmosphere that, again, made you forget just how far the Canadiens were from something like this through a league-worst 5-10-2 start to the season.
It was also the kind of performance that signaled they know how they must play over their last 16 games to keep this season from ending on April 16.
“I think, from start to finish, it’s one of the best games we’ve played since I’ve been here,” said St. Louis, who became Canadiens coach on Feb. 9, 2022. “The fans spoiled us in the third, and we want to give this to them. It was a great experience for everyone that was in the building tonight and I had a lot of fun in the third with how we carried ourselves and the atmosphere in there. I want us to earn more moments like that.”
They’ll only come with the same type of defensive commitment all the Canadiens showed in this game.
It wasn’t just Nick Suzuki’s line, with Juraj Slafkovsky and Cole Caufield, which has carried the Canadiens to a 7-1-2 record since the break by outscoring its opposition in all situations by a combined score of 19-3.
They all hit the scoresheet again and dominated defensively against Aleksander Barkov’s line, but they had help from the three other Canadiens lines.
Patrik Laine scored the opening goal on the power play. His line, with Alex Newhook and Joshua Roy, outchanced its opposition 2-1 while notching seven shot attempts and allowing only seven.
Dvorak’s line, with Brendan Gallagher and Josh Anderson, held a 12-9 advantage in shot attempts and a 9-3 advantage in scoring chances, while Jake Evans, Joel Armia and Emil Heineman kept things relatively even despite heavy defensive deployment against most of Florida’s best players.
And while the Canadiens leaned heavily on their top four defencemen, what they got of David Savard and Arber Xhekaj was something that must be replicated from here to the end.
Savard and Xhekaj hadn’t played well over the two previous games.
“I think they can play better,” said St. Louis on Friday.
Savard and Xhekaj played one of their best games on Saturday.
Behind them, Samuel Montembeault was only forced to be at his best right before the game ended, and then he was talking afterwards about how different the team looked in front of him from the one that started the season.
“We’re playing really well,” he said. “We’re not giving them much.”
It’s how St. Louis has been pushing the Canadiens to play since mid-November, and it’s largely been clicking since mid-December.
He’s gotten the buy-in he’s needed for the Canadiens to have put together the seventh-best points percentage (63.9) in the NHL over their 43 games since then — with just 11 other teams allowing less goals per game than their 2.83 — and he knows a performance like Saturday’s will only help him sell whatever other ideas he needs them to latch onto from here to the end of the season.
“You’re constantly convincing your players, selling,” he said. “It’s a big part, and a game like this helps what you’re after.”
It was the most important game of the season, played months after it appeared as though no games would be important this late into it.
And if the Canadiens keep playing this way, every single one of them will matter until the end.
