MONTREAL — The only thing missing from Cole Caufield’s celebration was a salute to Bill Guerin.
Maybe he wasn’t thinking of Team USA’s general manager immediately after scoring the goal that ultimately buried Guerin’s Minnesota Wild in Tuesday’s game, but just about everyone else at the Bell Centre was — and with good reason.
Caufield’s 25th goal of the season gave the Montreal Canadiens a 4-3 lead with 15 seconds to go, and it proved to be his NHL-leading 11th game-winner since the Americans lost the 4 Nations Face-Off by one goal to Team Canada without him last February.
Lane Hutson, who, like Caufield, was also left off the 4 Nations team and USA’s entry to the Milano-Cortina Olympic Games next month, scored Montreal’s third goal against the Wild. His assist on Caufield’s winner was his 52nd point (which is tied for most among American defencemen this season) and you couldn’t blame Canadiens fans for feeling extra happy that both he and Caufield contributed to the win the way they did in front of Guerin.
You couldn’t blame them for fixating on these big-game players making big plays in this specific game.
But the small plays that three Canadiens role players put together in this win caught our attention.
Because Brendan Gallagher, Phillip Danault and Josh Anderson compiled more momentum-shifting plays than anyone else on the Canadiens on this night and they found something together that can benefit the team just as much as some of the big plays Caufield and Hutson have routinely delivered.
“It feels like tonight we found our identity,” said Danault.
They were searching for it in their first game together — a 6-5 win over the Ottawa Senators on Saturday — but because they truly found it against the Wild, Danault scored his first goal of the season.
It helped wrestle back the momentum the Canadiens had worked so hard to establish through the first 15 minutes of the game.
Danault’s first goal in 275 days — and his first goal as a Canadien since May of 2021 — came in the 60th second of a fourth tone-setting shift for his trio. He, Gallagher and Anderson stormed the offensive zone and cycled the Wild to exhaustion before he finally arrived in front of goaltender Jesper Wallstedt right on time to capitalize on a rebound that came off an Anderson tip.
This goal was the fruit of the line’s early labour, but the Canadiens feasted on all the other work they did as the night went along.
There Danault, Gallagher and Anderson were again, wrestling back momentum two minutes after Wild and Team USA defenceman Brock Faber seized it to tie the game 2-2 halfway through the second period. They spent 52 seconds hemming the Wild in, rendering them too tired to change and properly cover Ivan Demidov on the play that led to Hutson’s goal, and they had several more shifts just like that before Danault eventually set the screen on Caufield’s game-winner late in the third.
“I thought they were efficient,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis. “I thought they worked well together, they won a lot of battles, they extended o-zone, they forechecked, kind of to the identity you want that line to have.”
In the same response, he called this one of the best five-on-five games the Canadiens played all season, and it was no coincidence he was connecting that thought to the sudden appearance of a grind line he’s been searching for all season.
Without one, the Canadiens hadn’t been as efficient in limiting chances and they’d struggled to bury tired teams playing on the second half of back-to-backs, going 1-4-1 in those situations.
But with that grind line delivering, the Canadiens held the Wild to just two high-danger attempts at five-on-five and notched their first win against them in 10 games.
The punishing forecheck Danault, Gallagher and Anderson brought was as much a factor as Caufield’s and Hutson’s goals, and they know it’s what they need to bring more consistently for the Canadiens to win the harder games to come down the stretch.
“It’s very important,” said Anderson. “I think it’s important for our line to create that identity that our team needs.”
He, Danault and Gallagher met in the lead-up to Tuesday’s game to discuss how to bring it.
Danault and Anderson said they pored over tape with associate coach Trevor Letowski. Gallagher said they focused on spreading themselves out a bit more and balancing themselves better in the offensive zone. And then they went out and delivered a convincing result.
The line had 15 shot attempts to Minnesota’s five, they had a 65 per cent share of the expected goals, and they created the wave of pressure that other lines extended.
It might have been the subplot to this game, with Caufield and Hutson delivering reasons for Guerin to be concerned about not having them on Team USA, but it was the more important story for the Canadiens.
