While the Carolina Hurricanes’ early qualification for the Eastern Conference Final gave them plenty of time to rest, it also gave the Montreal Canadiens plenty of time to prepare for them. Not that Martin St-Louis started preparing his men before eliminating the Buffalo Sabres, but the bench boss knows how to delegate and use his staff.
We’ve not heard a lot about Alex Burrow since he stepped down as an assistant coach back in July 2024, but he still works for the Habs as a player development consultant, and last night, St-Louis gave him some credit for the Canadiens’ win in Game 1:
We knew for a long time that if he got through Buffalo, we were playing Carolina. Obviously, our analytics people, but also Alex Burrows, does a lot of that grunt work for us, and he worked hard while we were trying to close out the series against Buffalo. You have to be careful when giving players so much information in a short amount of time; pick a couple of things and try to address them. That’s what we did. I […] We didn’t take so much time that we took the instinct out of our players. You know that it’s going to be a long series; you have to get better through it. You don’t have to be perfect; you have to find ways. But we did talk about a few things we needed to address before we jumped into this series.
– St-Louis gave credit to Alex Burrows
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Once again in this series, St-Louis likes to give credit where credit is due. In the previous round, he credited Marco Marciano with a key decision when it came to goaltending, and in this one, he sang Burrows’ praises.
Watching the Canadiens counter-attack in the first frame, it was obvious that they had been well briefed about how the Hurricanes would attack and where the holes would be. It looked extremely easy for the Habs’ forward to create odd-man rush opportunities, and that allowed their skill players to have time to work their magic. Ivan Demidov came down in front of Frederik Anderson all on his lonesome and had plenty of time to use his fancy stickwork.
When Cole Caufield scored the first goal, it looked like he used the puck as bait, throwing it in the opposite corner, knowing that Nick Suzuki and Juraj Slafkovsky would go in to retrieve it, but also that the Hurricanes would go to it like a moth to a flame. That’s exactly what happened. Four of the Canes five players converged toward the puck, leaving the sniper all alone to not only receive Slafkovsky’s pass, but also cut to the middle of the zone to give himself a better angle.
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Montreal shouldn’t expect things to be so easy in Game 2; however, the Canes looked like the Habs did in their first game against the Sabres and coach Rod Brind’Amour confirmed that:
We weren’t ready for the pace… Give (Montreal) credit, they made plays. They made plays, and they got us, but I didn’t really know what we were doing.
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It will be interesting to see how the Hurricanes adjust in Game 2, as they’ll want to tie the series before heading to Montreal for Game 3 on Monday night.
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