BROSSARD, Que. — Another grim week in Montreal, where the Canadiens floundered and the sharks began circling.
Hence several pointed questions submitted to this mailbag about Martin St. Louis’s immediate future as head coach.
I get it.
The results — seven losses in the last nine games, including stretches of four in a row two weeks ago and now three in a row, and counting — are unpalatable. The way they’re being earned is completely indigestible, with the Canadiens taking a clear step back from how they played to finish last season. And it’s St. Louis’s job to fix it.
So, let’s expand on this subject before getting to the others.
The Canadiens aren’t firing Martin St. Louis.
Not now. Not anytime soon. Possibly not ever, if he does what they expect him to do with this opportunity.
That’s what this is: an opportunity. St. Louis has a specific opportunity right now to make the Canadiens more accountable, and he can’t let it go by.
The coach has talked a lot about the healthy culture the Canadiens have established, and about the welcoming environment they’ve created.
But he needs to be the driving force in that culture and environment evolving for this team to not only get to where it wants to go, but to also be prepared to do what it wants to once it gets there.
First, think about where the Canadiens came from. When St. Louis took over in the middle of the miserable 2021-22 season, his main task was to get the players enthused and encouraged about competing as hard as possible, despite knowing good results would be nearly impossible to achieve. It was to develop and teach and encourage, tolerating certain mistakes to keep players from getting discouraged and keep them working to the max to make the first official rebuild in franchise history tolerable.
None of that changed over the last two years, but it needs to change now.
St. Louis knows it.
It’s a hard switch to flip for a coach who’s been as nurturing as he has in Montreal, but flipping it will make him — and the Canadiens — better both now and in the long run.
That’s really what this is about.
It’s much less about structure, which Canadiens fans have been understandably concerned about, given defensive metrics being largely atrocious through 12 games this season.
The Canadiens might have struggled employing the hybrid system St. Louis wants them to play up until — and including — their 7-2 loss to the New York Rangers two weeks ago. But games that immediately followed showed they can execute it. And St. Louis is right about the best teams in hockey using it, about more and more teams adopting it, and about the need for his team to continue with it to have it mastered by the time it’s expected to be a winning team.
Now he and his staff need to get more granular, because it’s the details within the structure that need major work.
That’s what made Monday so interesting at the Canadiens’ south-shore practice facility.
It started with defencemen Justin Barron, Arber Xhekaj, Lane Hutson and Jayden Struble hitting the ice with director of development Adam Nicholas 90 minutes before practice. They worked on drills specific to neutral-zone gap control, on fundamentals, on body positioning and stick angles.
It was real micro-level fine tuning.
Then all the Canadiens centres — Nick Suzuki, Jake Evans, Kirby Dach, Alex Newhook, Christian Dvorak, Oliver Kapanen and Kirby Dach — participated in a 40-minute face-off clinic with former Canadien Marc Bureau, who was arguably the best specialist in the NHL before the league started officially tracking and publishing face-off stats.
Not a bad idea for a team 25th in the NHL in the category.
St. Louis had some other good ones when practice eventually began at 10:30 a.m.
He pushed the players through a tough workout, stopping drills for some pointed instruction, demanding more intensity just three days after bag-skating them in Washington.
Those were samples of the coach embracing the need to institute greater accountability with his group.
Now, he’ll have to do it more from game-to-game — and within the games themselves — to address the mistakes being made.
“I think, as a team, we’re in transition,” St. Louis said after Monday’s practice. “As a coach, I’m in transition, too. To the players, they’re well aware that I’m in transition as a coach as well. If we’re going to transition as a team, I have to be in transition as well. It’s a big part of this season for me. We’re at a stage now where we’re not at the same stage as two years ago, a year ago, and when you’re going to a different stage there’s a transition on many levels … ”
The transition he was referring to was from a team in development to a team that’s learning how to win, and he knows that he will have to be more exacting now to generate the desired results in making that transition successful.
That means benching any player (no matter their status) for the type of inexcusable mistakes we saw during the third period of last Thursday’s game against the Capitals.
It means scratching a veteran player such as Christian Dvorak, who was mentally disengaged enough to make an unforgivable mistake that directly led to a Capitals goal in the second period and another that nearly cost the Canadiens one in the third.
Sitting Dvorak for the next game against Pittsburgh Penguins wouldn’t have just sent a message to him, but also to the rest of the team.
St. Louis didn’t do it, and Dvorak responded, regardless — scoring Montreal’s only goal in the game and performing as one of its best forwards. But the coach can’t ignore opportunities like that moving forward.
Seizing them is part of the growth process for him at this stage.
Canadiens’ management expected St. Louis would have to go through this. I believe they’re confident he’ll come out of it on the other side of it a better coach.
A more important question is: What’s a realistic solution when it comes to how Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky, Kirby Dach and Alex Newhook are playing?
Because if the Canadiens are going to turn things around soon, those guys need to be at the heart of it.
Let’s start with Suzuki and Caufield. They appear to be getting a pass, with Suzuki having more points (13) than games played (12) and Caufield owning a share of the league lead in goals (10).
They get hard matchups night-in, night-out, no doubt. But that doesn’t excuse them being the two forwards with the highest expected goals-against numbers on the Canadiens at five-on-five.
Suzuki is ninth among forwards in expected goals-for percentage, Caufield is 11th, and that’s just as much a reflection of how both have played since the start of the season as the traditional stats are.
They know it.
“I know I have to play better for us to win games,” Suzuki said on Monday. “It starts with me, and if I’m not going the right way and doing things to my full capacity, it hurts the team. So I have to be better. The points is what it is, but I think just my overall game can be better and I’d still be able to produce.”
Caufield is far from happy about the way he’s played so far.
“I wouldn’t say I’m satisfied with anything,” he said. “The goals on the outside look good, but I think overall it could always be better and I need to round out other parts of my game.”
Slafkovsky has a goal and eight points in nine games. Do you think he’s happy with the way he’s playing?
Sure, the 20-year-old, who’s missed some time due to injury, is producing. But he was the first to acknowledge he’s been straying too much from the direct style of play that netted him 20 goals and 50 points last season.
“Lots is missing, and I don’t like the way I play, and I’ve got to change,” Slafkovsky said. “Hopefully, the change will come (Tuesday against Calgary). I’m trying to prepare for every game, and it just simply hasn’t been going the way I want it to. I have to be better in general.
“Being better with the puck, better with decisions. There’s so many things I could tell you about myself that I’m not doing right at the time.”
Dach, who missed all of last season, is having similar issues. He has shown flashes of the player he was before tearing the MCL and ACL in his right knee, but he has struggled to find the consistency he needs to help the Canadiens move forward.
And the game has never looked harder for Newhook than it has over the last month, with just two goals and no assists through 12 games despite consistently working very hard.
All this needs to change.
If it does, that’ll help Joel Armia, Josh Anderson and Dvorak, who are all playing lower in the lineup. They can be much more effective in their roles with the insulation a functioning top six can provide.
Meanwhile, all three of those players have made strong contributions to the 13th-best penalty kill in the league.
None of them are ripping it up on the scoresheet, but they’re getting way more negative attention from the fans than they deserve, relative some other players who are producing but not pulling the Canadiens in the direction they need to go in.
It’s a bit early to say the Laval Rocket will contend for an AHL championship this season, but a seven-game winning streak is indicative of some very strong play for one of the youngest teams in the league.
With how things are going, I don’t believe management is intent on disturbing the Rocket’s flow to the help the Canadiens at this moment.
Joshua Roy, Logan Mailloux, Owen Beck and Luke Tuch are young players who are thriving and developing, and it’s hard to imagine they’d be in a better place for that to continue if they were plucked out of Laval and promoted to the Canadiens.
GM Kent Hughes is active on the market, no doubt.
It’s no secret he’d like to add a veteran defenceman to stabilize his blue line and a gritty forward to give the Canadiens a bit more edge up front.
But the GM isn’t willing to do that at just any cost, and costs are prohibitive — even for depth pieces — in early-November.
If something is out there that makes sense, perhaps Hughes will pull the trigger.
But I don’t see him urgently looking for band-aids to patch current problems, and I don’t think there’s anything available to him on the market that would enable him to do surgery for the long-term benefit of the Canadiens.
If electrifying Russian prospect Ivan Demidov — who was chosen fifth overall in the 2024 draft — were in Montreal, I’m sure the Canadiens would be slotting him into their top six.
I would, too.
Demidov’s talent is already on that level, and he’s showing it by producing a ton despite such limited ice time.
The kid has six goals and 19 points in 23 games playing a bottom-six role for SKA St. Petersburg. Imagine what he could do playing with Suzuki and Caufield or Dach and Slafkovsky?
I’m sure there’s interest from the Canadiens in signing Jake Evans. And if there isn’t, there should be.
Not that they should rush to do it after what might be the best 12-game sample of his career to date.
From a negotiation standpoint, that wouldn’t be optimal. Especially since the Canadiens can’t keep Evans at just any price.
If he continues to be as good as he has been, he could price himself out of Montreal as an unrestricted free agent. That’s just the reality.
The Canadiens like the player. They know he’s reliable, and they know that even if they have players like Beck and Oliver Kapanen — and Michael Hage at the college level — a role like his on a winning team typically isn’t filled by a player who’s only two or three years into his NHL career.
But I’m not sure they’d be willing to sign the 28-year-old Evans for more than three years at a dollar figure exceeding $3 million per, and he might get more than that on the open market if he keeps going this way.
The Canadiens will probably want to keep Evans, but they’ll also have to consider what else might be out there for cheaper next summer. They’ll also need to think about Evans’s trade value at the deadline if they don’t turn their season around in a hurry.
Even if they like the player, that’s how they must approach this.
As for David Savard, he’s 34 years old, and the calculus on him is a bit different.
It doesn’t mean the Canadiens won’t consider re-signing Savard for another season if he’s willing to accept that short of a deal — and what’s likely to be a reduced role.
I’m sure they’re keeping that possibility in mind, as they take measure of the progress — or lack thereof — exhibited by their young defencemen and balance that with the need for veteran stability on the back end.
Still, potentially offering a contract to Savard is a decision for much later.
I think the young defencemen need to be put in those spots. It’s part of learning and developing.
As I mentioned above, the system isn’t the problem, and it isn’t going to change because changing it would purely be short-term thinking and (even if the Canadiens are in transition from development to learning how to win) they’re not doing things exclusively for the short-term.
As for the stats — and for as ugly as they appear — we’re still only 12 games into the season.
I think that’s been hard to put in perspective for many who not only expected progress but wanted to see it immediately.
I’m not downplaying the issues the Canadiens have had, but I think it does need to be put in perspective that they were going to have ups and downs this season like any other team not expected to be among the top ones in the league.
Their issues are under the microscope and magnified because they’re pervasive right off the hop.
Downs are never easy to deal with in a market like Montreal, but they’re particularly challenging at the start of a season.
This one has forced the Canadiens to address things structurally and, as noted, there have been some improvements since the loss to the Rangers.
Now, they can work on the details.
It’s a growth opportunity, too — and not just for the coach on the accountability front.
The players need to push themselves, too.
“We’re a young team, but we have young guys that have been here for a while, and this is probably the perfect chance for that opportunity,” said Caufield. “The coaches can say enough and say what they want and at the end of the day we’re the ones out there. At the end of the day, Marty gives us the best chance to win every night and we’re the ones that have to go execute that plan. It’s on us. We’ve got to hold each other accountable, and I think we’re looking forward to doing that and maturing as a group.”
