OTTAWA — This was Lane Hutson as we haven’t seen him at this level — fumbling under pressure, passing off target, forcing more plays than he was executing, and doing all of it from start to finish in a 5-2 loss to the Ottawa Senators.
Now add in totally uncharacteristic performances for Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky and Kaiden Guhle, and it’s easy to consider Friday’s game an anomaly.
Bad timing for one to pop up, no doubt—with the Canadiens a regulation win away from clinching their first playoff berth since 2021—but not fin du monde type stuff.
The math is still heavily in their favour, and a game against Toronto is on tap Saturday before season-closing ones against the Chicago Blackhawks and Carolina Hurricanes are to be played in Montreal next week.
There’s plenty of opportunity for the Canadiens’ best players to rebound, and ample reason to believe they will. They’ve carried their team to the one-yard line and one bad down from there isn’t likely to lead to three more.
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Still, like everyone else on the Canadiens, these players need to undo the one troubling trend that emerged early in their most recent six-game winning streak and finally bit them right in the you-know-what in their first loss to the Senators this season: Their starts need to be better.
“I think just being mentally sharp right from the start and not tiptoeing into the game,” said Hutson. “We’ve got to go out and take the game and play hard right from the start.”
It’s what the Canadiens hadn’t done in four of the six games they played coming into Friday’s game.
Instead, they surrendered early momentum in all of them—and leads in three.
They did it again Friday, but the difference, after allowing a goal 28 seconds into the game, is they finally lost.
The good thing is losses often create the urgency wins can’t.
Martin St. Louis didn’t disagree with that after the game, and he also didn’t disagree with the probability his best players will rise to the occasion and instill that urgency his team needs right now.
“I feel they respond,” said the coach. “I feel these guys have responded all year. They’re a proud group.
“It just wasn’t our night tonight.”
It certainly wasn’t.
Suzuki, Caufield and Slafkovsky may have all combined for a goal, but if Slafkvosky hadn’t changed at the last second on the Dylan Cozens’s goal to make it 2-0, all three of them would’ve been on the ice for four of the Senators’ tallies. To see them thoroughly dominated by Ottawa’s third line of Ridly Greig, Shane Pinto and Michael Amadio — after they’ve regularly won matchups against the top lines of the league down the stretch of this season — was to know to what extent this was a one-off.
This was a total blip for Hutson, who came into the game with 64 points (just one away from passing Chris Chelios for the franchise record among rookie defencemen). He was also three assists away from passing Larry Murphy for the most assists a rookie defenceman has ever put up in an NHL season.
And those are just results.
Hutson’s process has been so astounding, and his execution at both ends and on both sides of the puck has been so regularly on point that a performance like the one he had Friday had become practically unthinkable.
You could see Hutson was burning after it.
The 21-year-old said he was “simply not good enough,” before agreeing that the opportunity to undo it in less than 24 hours was one he was looking forward to.
Guhle has no doubt his partner will be ready for that one.
“Like any elite player in any sport—they’re hard on themselves,” Guhle said. “You don’t want the kid to beat himself down for it. It’s one rough game out of I can’t count many others. The puck was just bouncing on him. But I’m sure he’ll respond tomorrow in a way he’ll be able to make up for it.”
Guhle will look to do the same, after playing well off the mark he set in returning from a two-month absence on Mar. 28.
The Canadiens must follow. Right from the start.
They feel they’re equipped to do it after all the lessons learned through the first three years of this rebuild.
They lost a lot at the start, lost by much closer margins in the middle, and they’ve spent the last 79 games learning how to win and mostly succeeding at that.
It’s been a process that has set them up well to complete the task.
“I think if you ask anyone that’s won anything, almost every single person has lost before,” said Guhle. “A couple of tough years, turning things around now, you don’t just learn how to win just like that. You gotta get kicked in the nuts before you figure out how to bounce back. That’s what we’ve learned, that’s what we’re doing.”
It’s been the story of the Canadiens’ season, with them undoing a league-worst 5-10-2 to put themselves in a playoff position.
Expect their best players to help them secure it.
