It has finally happened ladies and gentlemen.
The Montreal Canadiens gave us three consecutive competitive performances in the same week! Ending the week with a 2-1 record.
Now before we go full bipolar fanbase and claim things like “they’ve turned a corner”, “we’re back on track” or “The boys finally understand St-Louis’s defensive system”, we need to take a deep breath and remember a few things:
- Montreal is still in the bottom 5 of the league in the standings.
- The two teams they managed to beat are also bottom tier teams this season.
- When they actually faced a very good team (Minnesota Wild), they were competitive but -didn’t manage to actually score a goal.
-That lineup still has obvious “holes” in it with players currently not playing well enough to justify being regular NHL players.
Now that doesn’t mean we shouldn't be happy about the performances the team showed us the past three games. The new lines formed by Martin St-Louis have demonstrated chemistry and brought an interesting balance in the lineup.
What’s also very interesting is the special teams, despite it all, are still working at a very respectable level with the powerplay and penalty kill ranking at 9th and 14th in the league respectively. These imply that if Montreal can maintain the kind of competitive play they’ve shown this past week at 5 on 5, they could, in theory, improve their current record significantly.
Unfortunately, the one stat that’s been crippling Montreal since the beginning of the season is the goals allowed per game where they remain 31st in the league with a 3.89 goals allowed average.
This statistic can obviously be explained by the numerous blowouts they’ve suffered so far this year but I think it shows that this team’s main challenges remains poor defensive coverage….. And unfortunately less than stellar goaltending.
Samuel Montembault, despite his current statistics, has been mostly fine in my book but uneven season so far, going from solid performances to looking unreliable from game to game. If Montreal is to keep winning games and looking competitive, they will need “Monty” to be at his best every team he’s in the crease.
As for Cayden Primeau, it’s quite obvious the 25 year old goaltender is currently the worst goaltender in the league, both in goals allowed per game (4.67) and save percentage (.845). In almost every game he’s been in, he hasn’t really given his team a chance to win, which is the least you should expect of your backup goaltender. It’s always possible he bounces back and finds the same level that made management confident enough to trade away Jake Allen last season, but if there’s one thing in Primeau’s game that always seems fragile, it’s his confidence whenever things start going badly.
So far this season, things have rarely gone well for the young goaltender.. At 25 years old, he’s technically slowly entering his prime as a goaltender and if no improvement is shown, it wouldn’t surprise me if Kent Hugues and Jeff Gorton didn’t consider a change at the backup goaltender position in the near future.
Few quick notes:
Juraj Slafkovsky was benched from the middle of the 2nd period until halfway into the third after making a series of bad decisions with the puck that clearly rubbed Martin St-Louis the wrong way. I like that players can finally be held accountable for their play and we need to remember that Slafkosvky is still only 20 years old. He’s doing a lot of good things on the ice (he had a very, very good game against Buffalo) but he needs to do them consistently and learn to manage the game's different situations better to become the player we need him to be.
I know many fans cannot wait for Lane Hutson to finally get a chance on the team’s first powerplay unit and it’s going to happen at some point. We all know it and everyone on the team knows it. But as I mentioned earlier, Montreal’s powerplay results are good enough that a change isn’t actually needed for now. Mike Matheson continues to be good enough in these situations (despite some uneven play in general) and should remain on the top powerplay unit for the foreseeable future. Until then, having Hutson on the 2nd wave actually gives Montreal two decent units to send out there as he keeps creating interesting scoring chances for his teammates when his unit comes on the ice. I’m not sure we could say the same thing if he and Matheson switched places.
It might not be a great sign that Jake Evans keeps being one of the brightest spots on the team, but it’s hard not to appreciate what he’s doing so far this season. For the first time since the season started, the Habs seem to have found themselves a decent 2nd line as Evans, Caufield and Newhook have looked quite good together. Even Newhook, despite not scoring this past week, managed to get a few decent chances at 5 on 5, which can only be encouraging moving forward.
It’s crazy how expectations towards a player can make you see them in a new light. Ever since Josh Anderson has been dropped from the top 6 and powerplay units, we stopped trying to hope to see him score more than his typical 20 goals/30 points pace… I’ve come to truly appreciate what he brings to the table in his new role. He’s doing a good job on the penalty kill and, what do you know, is actually on pace for 18 goals and 41 points. Which would be his best season since joining Montreal in the 20-21 season despite playing almost two minutes less than his average with the Canadiens. He’ll never be worth the contract Bergevin gave him, but if he keeps playing the way he is, as we said with Gallagher last week, he can be useful to this team as long as he remains in Montreal.
The Canadiens only have two games this week against the Oilers and Golden Knights, both teams that are currently playing very good hockey. If Montreal can manage to get some points and/or remain competitive in both games, maybe the fans and media around the team will slowly go back to talking about them in a more positive way.
Thank you all for reading and have a nice day!
Hugo Brossoit (Scabeh)
Montreal Canadiens Blogger • 
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