WINNIPEG —This game turned on a play Juraj Slafkovsky started and Oliver Kapanen finished.
The Montreal Canadiens never looked back after that goal came in the 17th minute of Wednesday’s game against the Winnipeg Jets. It proved to be the first of five unanswered they scored in their 5-1 win at Canada Life Centre.
If not for Samuel Montembeault stopping 12 of the first 13 shots he faced — standing on his head for most of them — all we’d be doing is reflecting on one of the worst periods the Canadiens had played all season.
They were disorganized and disconnected, leaving Montembeault to return the favour they’ve done him in most the games in which he’s appeared out of sorts.
“I think it was my best game,” the 29-year-old said after not allowing more than one goal for only the second time in 23 appearances. “I felt great physically before it started.”
Montembeault was on Cloud 9 afterwards, with 36 saves banked and confidence restored, and that was a nice story on its own, even if it isn’t the focal one heading into the Olympic break.
Big picture: This was Montreal’s fifth win in their last eight games, with the other four coming against the elite of the elite (Minnesota, Vegas, Colorado and Buffalo). It’s quite a departure from what they did last year at this time.
Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis wanted them to chase to the break for the 4 Nations Face-Off, but they sputtered and choked, losing seven of their last eight games and digging themselves a hole almost too deep to climb out of.
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“We’re not the same team,” said St. Louis after the win over the Jets. “We might have a lot of the same players, but we have more experience. I think that playoff round (against the Washington Capitals) helped us mature. I think we carried that into the season and we were able to mature and able to navigate the lows we had this year just because of what we went through last year, and we understood what happened last year before the break and we did not want to repeat that. So, I felt we had the right intentions to give ourselves the best chance to not repeat that. And it’s not one guy, it’s not two guys. You need everyone, and I felt we had that.”
Despite pockets of play that weren’t great but never quite as bad as what we saw in Wednesday’s first period, the Canadiens found exactly that over this sequence of games.
A lot of it was driven by guys going to the Olympics.
On this night it started with Slafkovsky, who notched his 45th point of the season by peeling the puck off the boards, shuffling his feet to create space for himself near the point and leaning on his poise to get the play over to Noah Dobson.
It was more of the stuff the 21-year-old has delivered all season, which should make him that much more dangerous than he was as MVP of the last Olympics for bronze-medalist Slovakia.
“I think he’s made another big jump this year,” said St. Louis prior to Wednesday’s game. “You can see this year his confidence level, his touches, have improved tremendously… He’s played some really good hockey for us.”
So has Kapanen, who once again put himself in the right place at the right time to score that crucial first goal.
It was his 18th of the season, tying him with Beckett Sennecke for the most among NHL rookies.
“He’s smart, he’s in the good spots, he can read off playing with me and (Ivan Demidov),” said Slafkovsky Wednesday morning. “He’s in the good spots most of the time during the games.”
That’s where Finland will need Kapanen to be at the Winter Olympics in Milan.
Captain Nick Suzuki can’t wait to go.
“I’m just excited to get over there, get going with the guys in a few days and get going on the dream come true,” the London, Ont., native said after getting his second-lightest assignment all season.
Call playing only 16:56 against the Jets a gift from St. Louis, who knows how much energy Suzuki’s expended to push the Canadiens to the sixth-best record in the NHL through 57 games and how much energy he’ll need to help Canada in their bid for gold.
Suzuki may have been held off the scoresheet in the game against the Jets, but the Canadiens went 5-1-2 over their last eight with him posting 11 points and a plus-7 rating to bring him to 65 points and plus-25 on the season.
“He has the ability to elevate his game when we need it most, and he’s taken over games for sure,” said Brendan Gallagher Wednesday morning. “He’s in a good spot heading to the Olympics.”
As for Gallagher, Phillip Danault and Josh Anderson — the veteran triumvirate of the Canadiens — they all scored against the Jets to extend an excellent run of play that’s made them an unbreakable line moving forward.
The rest will likely benefit them most among all the other Canadiens not going to the Olympics, with all three of them being in their 30’s on a team full of 20-somethings.
The 31-year-old Mike Matheson, who played 24:50 against the Jets — which is his team-leading average time-on-ice this season — will reap the rewards, too.
St. Louis wants him, and everyone else to do that before practice resumes Feb. 17.
“Take a break, disconnect a little bit from the grind, be safe, have fun, but be hungry for what’s next,” was the message the coach imparted on his players.
Most of them will heed that advice and head to their tropical destination of choice.
But Lane Hutson, who scored as nice of a goal as you’ll see a defenceman score to get to 10 goals and 58 points on his season, isn’t like most of them.
He’s going to Boston to take in the rest of the Beanpot, and then he’s shuffling home to Chicago, where he will undoubtedly be on the ice more often than just about any other player in the league not attending the Olympics.
Don’t worry, that’s Hutson just doing what he wants to do most.
If we’re to take anything from the way he and the Canadiens played in the lead-up to this juncture of their season, it’s that they’ll be ready for the real fun when hockey resumes.
