DETROIT — It was striking how Alexandre Carrier came to Montreal last season and immediately looked like he had been playing with the Canadiens for several years.
What became evident with each passing game was how well his style of play fit with theirs. The five-foot-11, 174-pounder proved to be a fearless defenceman willing to ritually chase down pucks and transition them quickly and efficiently. He played hard, fast, directly, and in a way that fed the exact style of game the Canadiens were built to play.
We thought it was a homerun trade on the December day it was made. The Canadiens were desperate for some experience and a right-handed shot on the blue line, and trading fledgling prospect Justin Barron to acquire it from Nashville felt like a wall-clearing shot, especially with Carrier signed to such a digestible contract for a 28-year-old with top-four potential.
What made it an upper-decker, though, was how well Carrier popped in Montreal’s collective game.
Months later, four new players have been integrated, and all of them appear to fit as well as Carrier has.
You have to credit them. Zachary Bolduc and Oliver Kapanen have scored in each of the Canadiens’ first two games of the season, Noah Dobson and Ivan Demidov each registered assists in the team’s 5-1 win over Detroit on Thursday, and all four of them have appeared as though they’ve been in this system for quite some time.
But doesn’t that say even more about the system than it does the players?
Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis would agree with that.
To take it a step further, St. Louis said what’s really enabled new players to quickly integrate into the system is how comfortable his other players are with how the team wants to play.
“I think (the new players) came in at a good time because there’s a lot of continuity around them, so they’re not just being coached by the coaches, they’re being coached by the players too,” St. Louis said. “We’re very direct in how we want to play, and the continuity is enabling some teaching and getting details down. A lot of players can help the new guys integrate themselves with all the details, so I’m not surprised.”
Two games into this season, there are still kinks to work out.
But the Canadiens performed well in a 5-2 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs that included two empty-net goals on Wednesday, and they were just as good in this 5-1 Centennial-spoiling home opener for the Red Wings on Thursday. They were connected, fast, and particularly lethal on the counterattack.
It didn’t lead to as many quality chances as it should’ve in Toronto because the Leafs recovered reasonably well after feeding Montreal’s transition game. But it led to a beatdown in Hockeytown when the Red Wings didn’t.
After Dylan Larkin opened the scoring on the power play, Bolduc responded with the first of three counterattacks the Canadiens mounted to take a 3-1 lead after the first period.
Kapanen buried a rush chance that started with Demidov’s great stretch pass up the gut to Alex Newhook, and Mike Matheson finished one that started with Dobson and filtered through Nick Suzuki.
“Detroit plays with a good, hard, fast forecheck, and they’re very aggressive, so if you’re able to bypass that, there’s holes,” said St. Louis. “We played fast in possession against their aggression, which allowed us to go get odd-man rushes we capitalized on.”
The Canadiens played their system, with all the new guys appearing as though they’ve been playing it for years.
Part of that is because they appear to fit so well, but a bigger part of it is that the Canadiens are all on the same page.
St. Louis defines that as follows:
“To me, when anybody’s watching hockey, they’re usually focused on where the puck is, and the collective game is the other four guys — What are they doing? And also, when we don’t have the puck, we’ll have a defender on the puck, what are the other four guys doing? The collective game is you’ve got to be connected on both sides of the puck, offensively and defensively, and I find that we looked really fast at times because of our collective game. We have predictability inside of that, so we know where to go. So, the guy who’s on the puck, he knows where most options are going to be. And defensively, it’s the same thing… If you watch us play, I think you can feel that we do have a good collective game.”
It helps the individuals stand out.
Looking at Bolduc, Dobson, Kapanen and Demidov, the common thread is hockey sense. They all have it and — even if they’re well-surrounded and supported — that’s essential to them being quick studies.
Bolduc proved he had a strong sense in junior, using it to round out his game while piling up 105 goals over his last 126 games with the Quebec Remparts. It helped him score 19 as a 22-year-old rookie with the St. Louis Blues last season and it was one of the elements that made the Canadiens trade defenceman Logan Mailloux for him in July.
They liked the six-foot, 187-pounder’s direct, hard-nosed game, but they also liked his unheralded patience and poise with the puck, which was on full display in both zones through the first two games of this season.
“You play games, you start to understand what the NHL game is about,” Bolduc said on Thursday. “It helps create confidence, but also gives you the poise to be calm with the puck a bit.”
That’s been Dobson’s ace since he sat down at the card table.
He’s pulled it out of his sleeve through these first two games, too, moving the puck (and his body) very efficiently to own a team-high 68.58 expected goals percentage through nearly 33 minutes of five-on-five play.
Demidov’s had flashes, and Kapanen’s been brilliant.
“I just feel comfortable in our style of game, and getting the first goal really fast (in Toronto) was big,” the 22-year-old Finn said. “Last year, it didn’t come, so it was maybe in the back of my head a little bit. I mean, I’ve always been, in Europe, a guy who can score. Just want to do it now over here.”
The way the Canadiens play together is already helping him.
As Brendan Gallagher said, they’ve tweaked their neutral-zone system to be a bit more compact in the middle of the ice.
“Hopefully it leads to more turnovers because that’s where we’re really dangerous,” he said. “We have a lot of guys who, once they get going, can really make plays.”
The Red Wings enabled them on Thursday.
“I thought we made it pretty easy on them,” said Larkin. “Odd-man rushes… We know that’s their game, we talked about it.”
Yes, the Canadiens’ game is easily identifiable to their opponents.
They have a brand, and all their players — old and new — are clearly proving capable of executing it.
