Reasons for Optimism Abundant for Habs Despite Playoff Exit
Despite the heartbreak that accompanies a playoff series loss, the Montreal Canadiens have left their fanbase with many reasons for optimism and excitement.
The 12th seed Montreal Canadiens gave the 1st seed Philadelphia Flyers a true run for their money. The argument could even be made that Montreal outplayed Philadelphia in the series as a whole, but the bounces and the calls simply did not go their way, but alas, that is a topic for another article entirely, and deserved or not, Philadelphia is the team that progresses to the Final 8, not Montreal.
Not only did Montreal surprise analysts and fans alike with their playoff performance, but their play-in performance was even more unexpected. One thing that stood out during this postseason was that the Canadiens played as a team, especially defensively, something that cannot be said of the Habs performances ever since November.
The Montreal Canadiens successfully shut down Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in the play-in round and did the same to Philadelphia’s big guns (with the exception of Jakub Voracek) in the round of 16. Claude Giroux, Travis Konecny, Kevin Hayes, James van Riemsdyk and Sean Couturier all had a minimal offensive impact in the six games of the series, a far cry from their regular-season performances.
This is mainly due to the combination of sound defensive play, a good defensive system and excellent goaltending. We’ll get to Carey Price in a moment, but let us focus on the defending first.
The Montreal Canadiens were not a good defensive team in the 2019-20 regular season. Only 8 teams conceded more than Montreal’s 221 goals (an average of 3.11 goals conceded per game). While Montreal got overall poor goaltending from its backup goaltenders (despite Cayden Primeau‘s two excellent outings) and got mediocre play from Carey Price, the defending was the real issue all year long.
Shea Weber is a good defenseman, but his efforts did not make the Habs good defensively. Ben Chiarot is physical, alright defensively and pretty good offensively. Jeff Petry is good in just about all areas of the game. The individual pieces for a dominant trident, as Kevin Bieksa has now patented it, were there; but it just didn’t work. At least not until Brett Kulak elevated his play to make the trident a full-fledged pitchfork.
Analytically, Brett Kulak has been very good defensively for the past two seasons, but the eye test revealed that his play in his first and second seasons as a Hab differed tremendously. In 2018-19 he looked at home next to Jeff Petry, playing a really steady defensive style while chipping in quite a bit offensively, with 6 goals and 11 assists in 57 games. This season, when placed on the third pairing, Kulak really struggled to play the steady veteran role next to Cale Fleury and was a healthy scratch for a total of 15 games.
Still, when placed with Petry, he played decently; but Jeff Petry can make a very mediocre player look decent. Kulak was low on confidence and was a black hole in terms of offensive impact. The redemption arc that we saw from the Calgary native was, potentially, the biggest surprise of the Habs’ 2020 postseason. Kulak solidified himself as an offensively-threatening, defensively-stable top-4 defenseman.
While Carey Price, Jesperi Kotkaniemi and Nick Suzuki all exceeded expectations, their raw talent has always been apparent, and their performances, impressive as they were, are understandable in retrospect. The same cannot be said about Kulak, he hit a new gear since the restart and reminded me quite a bit of Jonas Brodin, a player the Montreal Canadiens has been linked with in the past and who many fans wished had been acquired by Marc Bergevin in the past year to shore up the left side of the defense. Well, it seems like Brett Kulak is the player to settle down the defence here in La Belle Province, not Brodin.
As I covered during the Pittsburgh series, Brett Kulak has been key to the Habs’ shutting down of the opposition’s offensive weapons. However, the rest of the top-4 stepped up their play, as well, forming two very reliable top pairings for the Montreal Canadiens.
The bottom pairing wasn’t tested nearly as much, but they got the job done in these playoffs, mainly thanks to Victor Mete, who played quietly played very well defensively, being on the ice for just one goal against in the 10 postseason games the Habs played and sporting a Corsi For% (percentage of own team’s shots on target when on the ice compared to all shots on target when on the ice) of 56. His partner, Xavier Ouellet was on the ice for 3 goals against (note that one of those 3 came on the penalty kill) and had a CF% of 46.6.
But it’s not just the defensemen that play a key role in defending, centremen are almost equally crucial to impeding high-danger scoring chances. During the regular season, Phillip Danault was the only top-9 centreman who excelled defensively. Nick Suzuki got better and better as the season went on, but was far from dominant in his own end. In these playoffs, however, the Montreal Canadiens had three top-9 centremen who played brilliantly defensively, with the aforementioned Suzuki as well as Jesperi Kotkaniemi taking huge steps forward in their play in their own end and with Danault continuing to play his patented steady defensive style.
It is quite interesting to analyze and compare Nick Suzuki’s and Jesperi Kotkaniemi’s postseason advanced statistics because on the surface, Kotkaniemi’s metrics jump off the page for being superb while Suzuki’s only very good. Of course, this is due to the difference in the quality of opposition the two-faced. Suzuki faced the top lines for most of the 10 games, while Kotkaniemi only did so for three or four, and Suzuki averaged 19:11 minutes of ice time per game, while Kotkaniemi was at 13:53 minutes.
That being said, Kotkaniemi’s performance was nevertheless superb. According to Natural Stat Trick’s database, he absolutely dominated possession at even strength, racking up 70.82% expected goals for, 83.3% actual goals for and a 62.19 CF%. Considering Suzuki played most of his even-strength minutes facing at least one of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Sean Couturier and Claude Giroux, his numbers also look excellent. He tallied 53.66 xGF%, 66.67 GF% and 51.47 CF% at even strength. He outplayed his opposition, and that opposition consisted of some truly excellent players.
These two centremen of just 20 and 21-years-old respectively created more offence than they allowed the opposition to create when they were on the ice, no small feat for the roles they played, who they played against and the stage on which they did so. Furthermore, Suzuki played 19:55 on the penalty kill, cementing himself as the centreman on the second PK unit, with Danault on the first; and only two goals were scored in those nearly 20 minutes of penalty killing. Kotkaniemi also helped out his defensemen by throwing hits far more frequently, with 36 hits in nine and a half games.
One area in which both young centremen struggled, however, is on the faceoff dot. Kotkaniemi won just 33.78% of his faceoffs, while Suzuki won 40.22%. They did, for the most part, take these faceoffs against players who are quite strong at faceoffs, but it is nonetheless an area that will need to see improvement.
However, these two centremen played excellently defensively, keeping the puck on the perimeter when defending and limiting the Penguins and Flyers to rather few high-danger scoring opportunities, proving that they both have the potential to become lethal two-way centremen in the not-so-distant future. Now that their stellar defensive play has been covered let us move on to their offensive production.
The fancy, advanced metrics suggest that Kotkaniemi and Suzuki played excellently in top-6 roles in the playoffs, but what about their real production and offensive impacts? Kotkaniemi failed to register an assist in these 10 games, which is quite surprising given his playmaking ability and his strong offensive play in those games. The most reasonable explanation is that his wingers were simply not scoring. Throughout the postseason, only 1 goal was scored by a player that was currently on Kotkaniemi’s wing, that being Drouin’s sole playoff goal. The assists will come, they just didn’t in this series.
However, the goals did come, with Kotkaniemi netting four goals in 10 games. Three of those came at the mouth of the goal, a result of good positioning from the 20-year-old Finn, while the fourth was a laser of a shot from the slot. His 4 goals were tied for the team-lead and for 11th in the playoffs as a whole with Nick Suzuki; surprise, surprise.
Suzuki also held the joint lead in points for the Habs, with 7, along with Jonathan Drouin. Speaking of Drouin, he looked dominant alongside Suzuki and Armia in the final two games of the Habs-Flyers series, his playmaking ability was on full display. Unsurprisingly to those who followed Nick Suzuki’s OHL playoff run last season where his Guelph Storm won the OHL championship despite having played 6(!) games with their backs against the wall, Suzuki came to play when the Habs were on the brink of elimination, registering 3 goals and 1 assist in those two games; the kid is clutch.
These two young centremen proved to the hockey world that they are not only the future of the Montreal Canadiens down the middle, they’re the present. Phillip Danault, who was forced to play as a #1 centre these past few years, is being pushed down the depth chart by a 20 and a 21-year-old.
Danault will, in all likelihood, see more ice time than Kotkaniemi this upcoming season, given his important role on the penalty-kill, but Suzuki will be the #1 centre when the 2020-21 season begins, and Kotkaniemi will probably play on the second line. The future, near and far, is beyond bright with these two players leading the charge offensively.
Ever since the monumental trade that was PK Subban for Shea Weber in 2016, fans and media have been speaking of “the window” in which Carey Price and Shea Weber will both still be near the top of their respective games. In the past year, more than just a few articles have been published stating that the window is closing if not already closed. Sure, Weber dominated for the first 35 games, but he struggled from that point onward, offensively at the very least.
It was said that Carey Price no longer seemed to be excellent consistently; he played badly in 2017-18 sporting a .900 SV%, he rebounded the following season with an alright .918 SV% but fell back once again this past season with a .909 SV%. Sure these numbers aren’t terrible, but a goalie being paid $10.5 million every year had better be among the very best in the league, which Price hasn’t been statistically since 2016-17.
While these are truly excellent points, especially considering Price’s price, I have always put more weight on what the NHL players think than many others. It is my belief that players who actually compete against every top goaltender in the league would not say that Carey Price is the league’s best goaltender if they did not truly believe it.
Both the NHLPA and The Athletic have held player polls over the past few years. Carey Price has been voted the top goaltender in the league in all three years in which the NHLPA has conducted its survey, and has been voted the goalie you wish you had in net for Game 7 of a Stanley Cup Final on The Athletic’s poll in both of the past two seasons.
This season, Price received 33% of the votes on The Athletic’s poll and received 41.55% of the NHLPA survey’s votes. For added context, The Atheltic’s poll consisted of 392 players, while the NHLPA’s consisted of nearly 600. Speaking of The Athletic, their poll also had 10% of the votes for best defensive defenseman going to Shea Weber, good for second overall, behind Victor Hedman.
So, Carey Price clearly remains the best goaltender in the league according to the players that have to face him night-in, night-out. Of course, respect for past achievement plays a part in these votes, but if it is easier to get the puck past Price than many other goaltenders in the league, as many in the media have stated over the past few years, why is it that nearly a majority of players in this league still see him as the most difficult to beat?
The same goes for Weber, he is still respected in this league. This postseason has simply shown to fans and the media what the players clearly already knew: Carey Price and Shea Weber are still dominant players in this league.
Let us start with the captain. Shea Weber was tied for third on the team in points, with five, three of which were goals. He did his fair share of heavy-lifting offensively. Defensively, he played as he always does, physically and intelligently. He showed us all why 10% of players voted him the best defensive defenseman in the league just this year. Weber sported a 54.23 xGF%, a 60 GF% and a 52.69 CF%, and all this against the very best that Pittsburgh and Philadelphia could throw at the Habs. If his decline truly is in full swing, it didn’t show in these 10 games.
Carey Price has, for the time being at least, truly silenced his critics. The newly-turned 33-year-old put up the best playoff performance of his NHL career, saving 93.6% of shots and sporting a GAA of 1.78. Put simply, Price dominated. It is truly criminal that his performances couldn’t squeeze the Habs into the second round; unfortunately, many of the Montreal Canadiens’ offensive weapons failed to step up. If they had, Montreal could have won the series in 5 or 6 games.
As unfortunate as this is, it does lead to optimism and excitement for this Habs team for the upcoming seasons, when Price and Weber are still great players, when Nick Suzuki and Jesperi Kotkaniemi form a dangerous 1-2 punch down the middle, when the defensive corps is stabilized and when Cole Caufield adds a true scoring threat.
Marc Bergevin may make moves this offseason as a result of his team’s performance to accelerate this retool since the team is closer to contention than many thought just a mere month ago. Trading opportunities will arise, and free agency may be rather interesting this season with forwards such as Taylor Hall and Mike Hoffman potentially being available and with defensemen like Alex Pietrangelo and Torey Krug possibly needing to find new teams.
In all honesty, I would be surprised if a big offensive addition is not made this offseason, given that the team has struggled to score consistently, and the defence has been solidified by Brett Kulak and will be further reinforced by Alexander Romanov. Also, expect a proven backup goaltender to be signed; Anton Khudobin, Corey Crawford and Thomas Greiss could all be excellent options. Bergevin said, upon the Canadiens’ elimination, that signing a quality backup is near the top of the offseason list of priorities.
Bergevin says it’s a priority to bring in a reliable backup goaltender. “It’s important for Carey Price to get rest.”
— Eric Engels (@EricEngels) August 22, 2020
And us fans may not have to wait until the playoffs conclude to see the Montreal Canadiens begin to make moves. Renaud Lavoie stated that Marc Bergevin has made it clear that teams eliminated from the playoffs are free to make trades.
Marc Bergevin souligne que les équipes éliminées ont le droit de transiger présentement @CanadiensMTL
— Renaud Lavoie (@renlavoietva) August 22, 2020
The outcome of these playoffs may not seem all that great for the Montreal Canadiens on the surface: they couldn’t get past the first round and lost out on the 9th overall pick, now picking at 16. But considering that this is a strong draft and that Cole Caufield dropped to 15 last season and Alex Newhook to 16, a real gem could still land in Montreal.
Aside from the draft, though, there is no downside in the run the Habs just had, I’d go as far as to say that the experience gained from it is worth far more than picking 7 spots earlier in this year’s draft.
Nick Suzuki is already cementing himself as a first-line centre in the NHL, Jesperi Kotkaniemi gained an incredible amount of confidence due to the huge step he took during these playoffs, as did Brett Kulak, Jake Evans proved that he is a very good 4th line centre and that he can chip in further up the lineup, Shea Weber, Carey Price and Jeff Petry proved beyond a doubt that they are still dominant players and Jonathan Drouin proved to himself that he can still become an offensive force in this league.
Of course, all this will factor into the further development of individual players and raise their confidence, but it also makes a statement to players around the league that this Canadiens team should be taken seriously and will be competitive this upcoming season, and will remain competitive for a really long time.
Next. The Habs did Trotz and the Islanders a favour. dark
Montreal is on the rise, and they used this opportunity gifted to them by the league to prove it to both themselves and the league as a whole.
All player statistics are taken from NaturalStatTrick.com unless stated otherwise.