Flat Canadiens Find A Way To Overcome Depleted Panthers

After losing their first match in nine games on Sunday night, the Montreal Canadiens were hosting the Florida Panthers’ C or D team at the Bell Centre on Tuesday night. Matthew Tkachuk was out of the lineup because he was on baby watch. Sergei Bobrovsky was acting as the backup. Aleksander Barkov, Aaron Ekblad, Sam Reinhart, Brad Marchand, Anton Lundell, and Evans Rodrigues were all out of action.

Meanwhile, Montreal had some fresh reinforcements with Kirby Dach, Alexandre Texier and Adam Engstrom entering the lineup. Brendan Gallagher was a healthy scratch, Joe Veleno was dealing with the flu, and Kaiden Guhle was given a day of maintenance. With Texier’s return, Alex Newhook moved to center, and Oliver Kapanen was demoted to the fourth line alongside Josh Anderson and Phillip Danault.

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Against a lineup that looked strangely like the one the Canadiens beat 10-2 in Carey Price’s last game, the Habs severely underperformed. Over 40 minutes, they had only tested Danil Tarasov 14 times, despite getting three power-play opportunities, and their only goal came on the man-advantage.

Over the course of the last four games, the Canadiens’ level of play just hasn’t been the same, even in the games they did win. As the coach likes to say, it’s not all about the result; it’s about the process, and the process has been severely lacking lately. The Canadiens have been coming out flat, and Tuesday night was no exception.

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Speaking to the media after the game, Martin St-Louis acknowledged that his team was having a dip in performance and explained:

There’s always a part of fatigue that goes into it, and not just physically; there’s an element of mental fatigue. We had a sequence when we really had to push and get some points, and we were pretty much perfect…that’s really demanding, you need to stay alert, there’s a pressure that comes with it, a stress as well, when you get that check next to your team, does that make you decompress a bit? Is that what’s missing to keep the pace you had? More than likely, but the goal remains to go back to that level, knowing it might have been impossible, difficult to keep that level.

With Cole Caufield still looking for his elusive 50th goal of the season, his teammates were once again desperate to find him with the puck, and just like on Sunday night, it resulted in poor execution. Nick Suzuki and Juraj Slafkovsky were constantly trying to feed him the puck, even if he was as covered as can be. At times, he was even covered by a couple of players, and they still looked for him.

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The only one who wasn’t changing the way he was playing was Caufield himself, only taking shots when appropriate. He was even the one who fed Ivan Demidov for the Canadiens’ power play goal. Still in the second frame, we saw less of the first line. Caufield had 4:27, Suzuki 3:51, and Slafkovsky 4:04.

In the final frame, the Canadiens finally turned it on, so to speak, peppering the Cats’ net with 15 shots and scoring twice. In the frame, Caufield 5:54 of action, Suzuki 6:49, and Slafkovsky 7:12. Speaking after the game, the captain had this to say about the team not being very good tonight:

“It started with my line; I was pretty brutal all night until I had the easiest goal of probably my career there, so it started with us. We were a bit too casual and thought we were soft as a group…

– Suzuki on what went wrong 

Putting Texier on the second line with Newhook and Demidov produced good results. St-Louis has often praised the Frenchman’s ability to extend the time spent in the offensive zone, and that’s exactly what he did, which allowed the Russian rookie to have more puck possession in the offensive zone. Spending more time there meant the defenders were more tired, and he proved quite a handful for them.

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It’s also worth noting that Newhook took 14 faceoffs on the night and won 10 of them, a 71% success rate. The fact that he had been doing well in that aspect of the play of late was one of the reasons why the coach was comfortable putting him back at center.