TORONTO — “It’s a tough league to chase in,” said Cole Caufield.
He was speaking from experience. His most recent experience, actually, after his Montreal Canadiens shot out to the worst start of any team in the NHL last season.
It left them staring up at every other team in the Eastern Conference by Dec. 1, and it ultimately left them gasping for breath by Apr. 21, right before they were quickly dispatched from the Stanley Cup Playoffs in five games by the Washington Capitals.
That was then.
Now? New season, new faces, new expectations and, hopefully, newfound desperation from the start.
Because Caufield is surely not alone in knowing that chasing it out of the gate in this league will be even tougher this year than it was last year.
Such is life with the Olympics looming, and with the schedule accordingly condensed to account for the three-week break in February.
It’s jammed right at the start for the Canadiens, with Wednesday’s season-opener in Toronto (7 p.m. ET on Sportsnet One and Sportsnet+) preceding a game in Detroit Thursday and one in Chicago Saturday. That’s three games in four nights, with the last one in a different time zone.
Aside from the break in February, there will be no relent. Wednesday’s and Thursday’s games will be the first of 16 back-to-backs the Canadiens will play this season. There will be many sequences of three games in four nights, and of five games in eight nights.
Having to play them while chasing the league is a recipe for failure and exhaustion. It’s why the message Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis has been spreading since the start of training camp has been: “Don’t wait for your alarm to go off.”
He knows there’s no time to hit the snooze button this time around, and he’s praying his group is mature enough to realize it.
“I hope so,” St. Louis said before the Canadiens flew out on Tuesday. “I think we’ve talked about that since Day 1 of camp. I believe that we can be (urgent)…”
He rightly pointed out deadlines spur urgency, and the Canadiens aren’t up against one Wednesday night.
They won’t be up against one until they get closer to Game 82, if not in Game 82, like last season, when the Canadiens finally clinched their playoff berth against the Carolina Hurricanes.
Damned if they haven’t learned from the experience and figured out a way to manufacture urgency themselves.
We get it, they’re young. They’re actually entering this season as the youngest team in the league, with the roster having an average age of 25.23.
But nearly all of the players currently with the Canadiens went through last year’s experience together, and it was one of many experiences they grew from since this rebuild began in 2022.
“We’ve been through a lot of down times and good times, and just being able to go through those things together as a group… I think all that experience gives us a lot of benefits going forward, and as everybody gets older, I think everybody gets a little bit wiser,” said Caufield.
He added there’s been physical and personal growth from everyone involved, too.
Take 24-year-olds Arber Xhekaj and Kirby Dach, who we featured in the pre-season. They each shared their own stories, with unique arcs, twists and turns. But the common thread between them was that their stories were two of many we could’ve told about Canadiens players coming of age.
“We’re still the youngest team in the league, but we’re getting older,” said 23-year-old Kaiden Guhle Tuesday.
He knows the Canadiens will have to prove the experience they’ve accrued matters, and that they’ll need to do it as early as Wednesday night.
Guhle believes they will. He thinks they’ll prove they’ve gotten more talented, with Ivan Demidov starting his official rookie season after getting a small taste of NHL action at the end of 2024-25, and with Zachary Bolduc and Noah Dobson now in the fold. And he feels it’s important that the Canadiens established themselves last season and earned some respect around the league because he thinks it’ll have them focused on what they need to do right off the hop.
“I think there’s something that you have to know going into every game is that teams are going to bring their A-game against us and teams are going to be ready to play,” Guhle said. “There’s not going to be any nights anymore where teams just think they’re playing the Habs and it might just be an easy night. I think teams know that we’re coming and we’ve got a lot of good, young players that are hungry. I think teams know that, and it’s going to be good for us to have that.”
It will help create some of the urgency that wouldn’t otherwise be there without an immediate deadline.
Internal competition should help, too, and training camp proved it’s stiffer than it’s been at any other point since the Canadiens undertook this rebuild.
They have depth at each position, and everyone appears to be coming into the season at full health, full of optimism, and hungry.
“We’re just going to see what we can do,” said Caufield. “I think we’re ready as a group and prepared to show it.”
