MONTREAL — We don’t think Martin St. Louis was being coy when he said prior to Wednesday’s game that the only changes he’d be making from the lineup that lost Tuesday’s game in embarrassing fashion to the Ottawa Senators would be Jakub Dobes for Samuel Montembeault and Jared Davidson for Florian Xhekaj.
It’s just that he ended up changing everything — and to great effect, even if the Canadiens only squeaked away with a 3-2 shootout win over the Winnipeg Jets.
What they gained from those changes might serve them particularly well at a critical juncture of their season.
It’s been grim for the Canadiens since the start of November, following a 9-3-0 sprint out of the gate in October. The additions of Patrik Laine, Alex Newhook, Kirby Dach and Kaiden Guhle to the long-term injury list created holes to patch up and down their lineup and made the balance they tend to thrive on far too elusive — and it showed in their 4-6-3 record. And the need to restore that balance immediately, as the schedule tightens and the intensity of each game mounts, has become more urgent.
If some of it returned to the Canadiens on Wednesday, following arguably their worst outing of the season a night prior, it had everything to do with how St. Louis assembled his lines and deployed them.
He said he wanted to reunite Juraj Slafkovsky with Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield to match them against Winnipeg’s top line of Mark Scheifele, Kyle Connor and Gabriel Vilardi because they’ve historically done well in best-on-best matchups. He said Brendan Gallagher moved to a line with Jake Evans and Josh Anderson because their best chance to make up for a bad night against Ottawa would be to address it together against the Jets. He said Joe Veleno, Zach Bolduc and Davidson would fill out the depth portion of the lineup, while Alex Texier would complement the skill of Ivan Demidov and Oliver Kapanen without slowing either player down.
But St. Louis made all of them feel important in ways they weren’t accustomed to and, in the process, gave himself the type of flexibility that can help him get the best out of the Canadiens far more frequently.
For example, trusting Demidov, Kapanen and Texier to make seven of their static starts in the defensive zone and seeing them do the job as effectively as they did was illuminating.
“As we go through this month, we have a lot of games. You have to be able to spread the ice a little bit, so you have to be able to trust people,” said St. Louis. “You’ll never be able to trust people if you don’t give them the chance.”
Giving Kapanen’s line some of that responsibility gave Evans the type of opportunity he hasn’t had all season.
Coming into the game, he had been given just 12 static starts in the offensive zone, but he got three against Winnipeg.
It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s as many as Evans got in the defensive zone, which was a big departure from his regular deployment.
Evans had started a team-leading 56 shifts in his own zone this season, leaving him almost no chance of generating some of the offence that would balance his sagging plus-minus rating. And as St. Louis said before Tuesday’s game, in which Evans got benched, a defensive player’s main source of confidence would only naturally be derived from their plus-minus rating.
He played 16:22, finished even, and had four shot attempts and two great scoring chances against the Jets, leaving him saying he felt “pretty good” about how he was used.
Demidov had to have been feeling the best he has since debuting in the league last April.
The 19-year-old played a career-high 19:29, saw ice-time in the final minutes of each period and was a force with and without the puck. He was dynamic, especially against elite defenceman Josh Morrissey, whom he twisted into a pretzel — and not just to set up Kapanen’s goal that made it 2-2.
The shot attempts were 12-3 Montreal in the 7:07 Demidov spent against the Jets’ No. 1 defenceman at five-on-five, and that had as much to do with what he did offensively as what he did defensively.
The 19-year-old gained points with his coach in this game as a result, and it should pay immediate dividends for the Canadiens if he’s able to reinforce the impression he made over his next ones.
“I feel like, game to game, it’s coming,” said Demidov.
It’s been there for Slafkovsky game after game.
His goal to tie the game 1-1 was his fifth point in his last four games, bringing his total to 15 over 26 games this season.
“I just keep telling myself that I want to dominate with and without the puck, be good on both sides,” he said after the Ottawa game, and his performance in that one stood out as one of the only good ones from anyone wearing a Canadiens jersey that night.
The point totals don’t reflect the end to which Slafkovsky is emerging as the player he wants to be. He’s becoming the player the Canadiens hoped he’d be when they drafted him first overall in 2022, and his recent stint away from Suzuki and Caufield helped him get there.
Putting Slafkovsky back with them opened other possibilities and gave other players wings in one of the most complete efforts of the season for the Canadiens.
It was a great response to one of their worst ones. Especially on the second half of a back-to-back against a rested team. And it came from everyone — from Arber Xhekaj, who won a fight against Adam Lowry and played strongly at both ends, to Veleno, who made the most of his ice-time by winning eight of his 10 draws.
Dobes also did his part, making 29 saves and stopping two of three shots in the shootout (Vilardi’s shot hit the post).
Putting him in was a no-brainer.
As for the changes that required some thought, St. Louis pushed all the right buttons, and that could offer more to the Canadiens than just the two points they took in the standings.
