Canadiens close road trip with something legitimate to build on in strong process win

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Before the first game of this leg of their trip, on the morning of Nov. 22, Montreal Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis had spent the previous two days trying to quell what he considered an unacceptable performance against the Boston Bruins , a game that seemed to deeply bother the coach, one in which he said his team played soft not once, but twice.

The Canadiens’ next opportunity to prove something had changed as a result of that game was against the Anaheim Ducks .

“It’s more so on us,” St. Louis said the morning of that game. “We have to show we can correct things quickly. So the focus is much more on our team tonight than it is on the Ducks. I know we’ll be ready, we know how they want to play, but we have to initiate. We have to bring our game, our best. It’s an opportunity to respond to the last two games and get back on the right track, and that starts with us.”

Whether the Canadiens actually did what St. Louis wanted from them that evening in Anaheim is highly debatable. They leaked scoring chances and rode some great goaltending from Sam Montembeault to a win sealed in the final five minutes on a goal by Alex Newhook .

There are a lot of parallels between that game in Anaheim and this one in Columbus that closed out the road trip. Newhook scored the Canadiens’ first goal in both games, Montembeault kept the Canadiens in the game for a stretch when they weren’t playing their best, and the Canadiens won on a late goal in regulation time, this time by Joel Armia .

But one thing the Canadiens didn’t do in Anaheim was play the way St. Louis was hoping they would play the morning of the game, by initiating, by bringing their best game.

They did that in Columbus, even if it took them some time to get there. From about the halfway point of the second period, the Canadiens were initiating, they were willing to dump pucks behind the Columbus Blue Jackets defence and go after it, establishing possession in the offensive zone shift after shift. They demonstrated what the best version of themselves looks like, a version St. Louis has seen sporadically, during a game in Las Vegas, another one against Boston at home, and chosen to use as the standard the Canadiens must reach.

It’s a high bar, but once Yegor Chinakhov gave the Blue Jackets a 2-1 lead at 9:47 of the second period on a play where the Canadiens looked sloppy and disorganized in their own end, they reached that bar.

“The last 13 minutes of the second and the third period, I felt it’s the team we know we have, that we can play like that,” St. Louis said. “I said to the team today we’re chasing consistency, and chasing consistency for me is doing the things that are not fun, but doing them like you love them. It’s playing the game that’s in front of you and always taking care of the team. Today is another good building block of what we’re capable of, and you know, keep trying to build.”

The height of that peak ability for this team came over the course of two shifts not long after Cole Caufield ’s goal that tied it at 14:08 of the second period, his seventh goal of the season and his second in three games.

C'est l'égalité, gracieuseté de Cole

Right place at the right time #GoHabsGo pic.twitter.com/qeN5893D0n

— Canadiens Montréal November 30, 2023

There was a shift from Nick Suzuki ’s line with Newhook and Brendan Gallagher a little over a minute after the goal — the Canadiens’ best line of the road trip — where they buzzed in the offensive zone and produced chances. They established possession well enough that they were able to pull off a full line change without relinquishing possession in the offensive zone, and Christian Dvorak ’s line with Caufield and Juraj Slafkovský continued the relentless pressure. The Canadiens pulled a second line change, and while the puck did come out of the zone shortly afterward, Montembeault was able to hit Armia with a breakaway pass from his own end that Armia couldn’t finish.

The impact of that sequence on the game was immeasurable.

“Huge,” Mike Matheson said before the question was even finished. “Especially in the second period. That’s one thing that when I was playing in Pittsburgh, they’d be harping that all the time, Sid ( Sidney Crosby ) and Tanger ( Kris Letang ), they’d be talking about that all the time. Like going into the second period, ‘Let’s get an O-zone change!’ Because you see it, once you get that change, the other team’s gassed and you’ve got a new line getting out there.

“I was surprised we didn’t score because usually you score.”

The Canadiens didn’t have to score to have the desired effect. They saw the best version of themselves, carried it into the third period and rode it to victory.

“That’s a luxury you have in the second period because the bench is so close, and you don’t get to execute that or have that opportunity if you don’t manage that puck while you’re in the O-zone,” St. Louis said. “I felt like we didn’t force plays, but we still had an attacking mindset where we’re putting the puck in the right spot, we weren’t just going to have a hope play and it’s going to kill the offence and that opportunity to get a fresh wave out there. I thought we did that very well, and that’s something we talk about and continue to work on.”

St. Louis put a lot of emphasis on the result of this game to determine the success of the trip. But more so than the result, more than the winning record over the five games after the first game was so devastating to the team’s overall psyche, it was the process of how the Canadiens played over the second half of the game that can be legitimately retained as something to build on. That game in Anaheim was viewed as a building block because of a strong first period and a positive result that came despite how poorly the team played over the final 40 minutes.

The Canadiens worked diligently on their forecheck following the game in Boston and once they began using it against the Blue Jackets, the value of that work was evident. Most recently the Canadiens focused on rush defence — something St. Louis has already focused on this season — and while it wasn’t perfect against Columbus, it improved as the game went along. And even something the Canadiens didn’t specifically work on in practice showed improvement as well.

“There were 14 or 15 minutes where Sam had to make some big saves for us, but the rest of the game we were very effective, we got through the neutral zone much better in the second and third period and I liked the time we spent in the offensive zone and what we did with that time,” St. Louis said. “It’s something we haven’t worked on much recently and I felt our effectiveness in that zone had slipped a bit recently. We talked about that a lot today and yesterday, and we looked a lot more comfortable.”

St. Louis continuously mentions that for a young team, showing an ability to correct themselves is an important part of growth. They didn’t fully do that in Anaheim, even though they got the result. They didn’t do that at all in San Jose, even though they got the result. And they didn’t do that in Los Angeles and were shut out for the first time this season as a result. But they did that midway through this game in Columbus, and now the challenge will be to prove that correction is permanent, or at least lasts longer than it did after the game in Las Vegas or the game at home against Bruins, because in each of those cases, it didn’t last all that long.

An ability to correct themselves is indeed an important part of the team’s growth, but so is showing that correction can take hold, that it’s not two steps forward and one step back. And as St. Louis said prior to the game in Anaheim, that is more so on them.

(Photo of Cole Caufield: Jason Mowry / )