Achi news desk-
MONTREAL – To fully understand the complex puzzle that Montreal Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis, facing his third full season behind the bench, a brief recap of his team’s final game day of the 2023-24 season is required.
Before the game, defender David Savard was talking to reporters about winning the Jacques Beauchamp Trophy, awarded to the team’s unsung hero of the season. Savard is entering the final year of his contract and will turn 34 about two weeks into next season. There’s an urgency to Savard that isn’t the same for many of his teammates.
“I believe next year we have the group to make the playoffs,” he said. “That’s my goal in September: get here, stay in Montreal and make the playoffs. I want to experience that once in my life, to be in the playoffs in Montreal. It would be pretty special to wear that uniform in the playoffs. I saw it as a fan, and I think the city is going pretty crazy, so it would be fun to see it from the right side of things.”
The Canadiens scored a go-ahead goal against the Detroit Red Wings in the third period on Tuesday. It was founded by Lane Hutson, who was playing his second career game, and advised by Juraj Slafkovský, who was playing his 121st game. It was Slafkovský’s 20th goal of the season, earning him a $250,000 bonus. Slafkovský and Hutson were drafted in 2022, pick number 1 and 62; this was the first NHL Draft drawn up by the current administration led by Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes.
BY JURAJ SLAFKOVSKY 20 AIM
The Habs take a 4-3 lead. pic.twitter.com/CV92fzOPOP
— TSN (@TSN_Sports) April 17, 2024
Logan Mailloux – pick number 31 in the 2021 draft, the last of the previous administration led by Marc Bergevin – had help in his NHL debut. The other goals were scored by Alex Newhook and Cole Caufield, two players selected back-to-back in the middle of the first round of the 2019 draft, and Brendan Gallagher, who will turn 32 in May and has three years left on his $6.5 million contract million. Hutson and Slafkovský were 6 years old when Gallagher was drafted in 2010.
They are all at different stages in their careers, and they all have different needs. But they will all be expected to push together to reach the goal that Savard pointed out so decisively before the game, said one-goal captain Nick Suzuki with equal conviction in Ottawa on Friday. The Canadiens are definitely at a crossroads, and while Gorton and Hughes bear much of the burden for achieving that change in playoff aspirations, St. Louis will be the one tasked with delivering it. .
And in that sense, St. Louis is also at a crossroads in his young coaching career.
Until now, the Canadiens had no expectations – internally or externally – to do what Savard and Suzuki made clear they expected the team to do next season. At the Canadiens preseason golf tournament, Gorton wouldn’t even say the word playoffs, preferring to call them the “p-word” and say that wasn’t the expectation for the season. It’s hard to imagine him having the same reluctance at next season’s golf tournament in September.
St Louis was an intense competitor as a player, and remains so as a coach, but he is more measured in that intensity because he has more information and more people to consider than just himself . Wins and losses are no longer black and white. There is tone and context that goes into every win or loss, and all of that is painted with the brush of the Canadiens in the midst of a rebuild.
Well, the Canadiens will now be hoping to come out of a rebuild, expected to make the same kind of moves made by the Red Wings, who were eliminated from playoff contention on Tuesday night despite beating the Canadiens for the second night in a row, this time 5-4 in a shootout. The Canadiens have been essentially out of contention for months.
How will St. Louis change as expectations change? He doesn’t know, but he also doesn’t seem to think he needs to change that much.
“It’s a balance,” said St. Louis. “I don’t want to lose myself with consequences, because you lose your mind. You want to go back and watch the film, maybe look at some data, but you have some truth where you are. Sometimes I’m going to be positive, and sometimes I’m not going to be so positive. Do I like to win? Completely. But I feel like the last couple of years I’ve been okay, I guess, to lose because we rarely get outplayed. Rarely got outplayed. So it’s hard not to be positive when you’re not beating yourself up. So, for me next year? I do not know. If we’re going to beat you, I’m probably not going to be very positive.”
It is not fair to say that St. Louis has always been positive with losses because he has not done that. When the Canadiens lost 5-2 on the road to the Boston Bruins on November 18, St. Louis was disappointed in his team’s performance, and he acted in kindness. He basically spent the next week working on the Canadiens prediction and nothing else because that’s what he cited as the reason they were so bad in Boston.
“To me, that game, it was clear that we weren’t touching the puck in Boston because we weren’t anticipating well,” said St. Louis. “And we spent a lot of time focusing on that, and it became a big part of why we were able to play with the best teams and why we were able to find more consistency in our game. That’s where it started.”
Gallagher called on the Canadiens to check the team’s identity, from being difficult to play against and constantly sending pucks deep and forcing the opposition’s defenders to do something they are not very enthusiastic about doing. But the Canadiens also needed to be willing to do something they weren’t enthusiastic about doing because every hockey player would rather carry the puck into the offensive zone and make plays offensively.
“When you’re talking about creating an identity as a group, it’s not going to be easy; it’s going to take a little time,” Gallagher said. “Rightfully so, he was frustrated with us because we probably didn’t raise him as quickly as he would have liked. But we stuck with it, and eventually you get results, players understand that this is the way to be successful.”
On the other hand, St Louis loves to say that everything starts with the truth. And the reality of Canadians is changing. Talented young players will take spots on the team, the talented young players already on the team have taken steps and are taking further steps, the older players on the team are in a hurry to win, and it seems that the managers feel at least a similar urgency. put the team in a position to win.
The Canadiens, for the second year in a row, finished near the bottom of the NHL standings and left the ice after their final game to cheers from the fans at the Bell Center despite losing their final game. It is hard to imagine those fans reacting in the same way if the same scenario presents itself for a third year in a row or if the players or managers are equally intelligent, either.
St. Louis has to manage all of that and it appears to be a challenge he has not yet faced as an NHL coach: to meet expectations, internal and external, to lead a winning product, a playoff product.
“I would be very surprised if we didn’t improve, whether internally or externally,” said St. “Our young players will be a bit older. That’s always the goal, and Kentshire (Hughes) will juggle that.
“I’ll see my lineup and I’ll go with that, and I won’t make excuses.”
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