Canadiens leave California with 2 wins but not significantly improved

LOS ANGELES — A little less than eight minutes into this game, Brendan Gallagher made a great pass to Alex Newhook right through the low slot, on the edge of the crease. Newhook couldn’t get a stick on it.

About seven minutes later, Los Angeles Kings centre PL Dubois — the once and future Canadien — was skating the puck through the neutral zone with Jake Evans in pursuit. Defenceman Gustav Lindström , an injury replacement from the minors, backed off the blue line and applied no pressure on Dubois, providing no support for the work Evans was doing to pressure the puck.

Dubois took that space and sent the puck through the slot to Carl Grundström in the opposite circle, and he hammered that pass behind Jake Allen with a shot the Canadiens goaltender had no chance of seeing, let alone stopping.

pic.twitter.com/THcoEO7QV4

— LA Kings November 25, 2023

And that, essentially, was game over for the Canadiens, who eventually lost 4-0, but really lost right at that moment. The Kings settled into their neutral zone trapping ways (more on that in a bit) and the Canadiens were unable to pierce that armour. They generated a couple of chances to score, but getting the puck under control in their defensive zone with the Kings pressuring them like crazy was a challenge, and once they did, getting it through the neutral zone cleanly was like stickhandling through mud.

The Canadiens knew this was coming, and they had a plan to counter it, but playing catch-up hockey against these Kings is no easy task.

“We all had to be on the same page; one guy’s out of position, they’ll take advantage,” said Nick Suzuki , who had a great chance on the power play but was foiled by Pheonix Copley . “They’ve been doing it a long time, their guys are really comfortable doing it. If teams could find a way to break that they’d have a lot more success. I thought we had a decent game plan for it, just kind of weren’t able to execute.”

This is the Canadiens’ reality. They are still learning their team concepts and haven’t had the reps to execute them the way the Kings can. And if we’re being honest, they don’t have the talent the Kings have either.

“They’re a really good hockey team, probably one of the hottest teams in the league right now,” Gallagher said. “They’re really in tune with their systems and they’ve got a lot of talent on the other side. We knew it was going to be a tough game.”

There is no shame in losing to the Kings, but the Canadiens arrived in California on Monday in a certain state of crisis. Coach Martin St. Louis wanted desperately to fix the team’s forecheck that had become so deficient, and in this game against this finely tuned team, the Canadiens got a clinic in how St. Louis wants them to do it.

“I felt we competed, I felt like we worked,” St. Louis said. “I think if anything, that offensive pace they play with in terms of getting pucks back; in our D-zone, when they lose the puck, they’re hunting to get it back and there’s not much room. You can’t generate that without everybody working hard off the puck and everyone having some pace to their game.

“That’s what we’re chasing, that’s what we want to look like in getting pucks back. When we do that, we’re hard to play against, we’ve just got to find more consistency in playing with that pace when we lose pucks.”

The Canadiens will depart California after one final practice here on Monday having won two games and lost this one, which, on the surface, appears like a successful trip. But really, in terms of defensive play and limiting chances, the one game the Canadiens lost might have been their most successful one, defensively at least, with wins against the Anaheim Ducks and the lowly San Jose Sharks littered with defensive breakdowns and scoring opportunities being doled out like Halloween candy.

“I don’t think we’ve played our best. We won two. We can be better for sure, and we kind of got exposed with that today,” Suzuki said. “We did a lot of video and stuff. We didn’t play the way we want to play. Came out with some wins, but we needed to be a lot better tonight against a really good team.”

Gallagher wasn’t quite as harsh.

“It’s hard to completely dominate teams for 60 minutes,” he said. “There’s parts of the last two games that we really liked, and there’s parts that we don’t and we need to correct. Speaking of tonight, tough team to play against, they take away your time and space. I thought the effort was there, the execution, it’s tough, especially playing in their building. The first goal would have helped, it would have forced them to open up a bit.”

Speaking of which ...

At one point in the second period, Mike Matheson had the puck in his own zone, looked up and saw five Kings players in the neutral zone. So, he waited, except the Canadiens were trailing at the time, and wasting time would only help the Kings. So he tried to attack that one-three-one trap, and failed.

It was somewhat reminiscent of what happened 12 years earlier, when the Philadelphia Flyers faced Guy Boucher’s Tampa Bay Lightning and simply sat back, waiting for the Lightning to break their trap and forecheck. And the lead “forechecker” waiting at the Flyers blue line in this clip is none other than Martin St. Louis.

“I would have liked to be leading by a goal and stand behind our net the rest of the game,” St. Louis said after the game.

It’s a funny line considering the above clip, but from the sounds of it, this is something that was actually brought up in the Canadiens room prior to this game.

“Marty was on that team. Marty was on the ice if you watch the clip,” Gallagher said. “If we had a lead, you would have seen it.”

As for whether Matheson considered doing it, just sitting there waiting for the Kings to act, he said the game situation did not allow for it.

“You can’t do it when you’re down. I think we would have considered it (if) we were up,” he said. “But that’s the nature of that game, you give up a goal or two and they’re just kind of sitting in it.”

The thing about such a disciplined trap like that is the Canadiens had to be just as disciplined in breaking it.

“They’re really good at it,” Matheson said. “You have to stay very patient against it and know that your level of what’s successful isn’t going to be, like a clean entry, hit the D late for a shot. That’s not going to be what you’re getting. You’re getting, you’re breaking it, getting in the zone, and then going to work. So I think you have to stay patient and know it’s going to be a game like that.”

It’s difficult not to think of the lost opportunity here, that a team coached by St. Louis would sit back and wait in their own end with the puck against a one-three-one neutral zone trap if only the Canadiens were able to get a lead.

That really would have been the perfect, viral capper on a trip through California that had two wins and one loss, some ups and downs, but didn’t really answer many of the questions that faced the Canadiens when they arrived.

(Photo of Mike Matheson: Gary A. Vasquez / USA Today)