Montreal Canadiens head coach Dominique Ducharme took over a team that was sputtering under Claude Julien.
The Habs started the year 7-1-2 but then went through a 2-4-2 stretch that spelled the end of Julien’s time in Montreal. They haven’t exactly been able to fix their tailspin since then.
Under Ducharme, the Canadiens are 12-13-5 in 30 contests. That’s not a good record for a team that thought they were going to be a Stanley Cup contender at the start of the season.
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You can’t really say that Ducharme isn’t doing anything about his team’s play. He has tried just about every line combination you can think of, but this team just can’t score goals. Since Brendan Gallagher went down with injury, the Canadiens have just 23 goals in 14 games. That is an average of just 1.64 goals per game.
That is literally less than Connor McDavid’s average points per game over the whole season. Not good.
It’s getting to the point where it might make more sense for Ducharme to just pick a lineup and go with it for a few games. If changing lines every night doesn’t work, write out a lineup that looks like it should work and give it a few games to find a groove and build a little chemistry.
Just take Jesperi Kotkaniemi for example. He played centre on a line Corey Perry and Joel Armia on Wednesday night. The game before that he was with Perry and Josh Anderson. The game before that he was with Artturi Lehkonen and Armia. The game before that he was with Lehkonen and Paul Byron. He even played some right wing on a line with Phillip Danault and Tomas Tatar earlier this month.
How is a 20 year old centre supposed to perform at a high level when he has different line mates every night? At practice yesterday, Cole Caufield was lined up with Jake Evans and Lehkonen. This is after playing with his first game with Danault and Tatar and his second game with Nick Suzuki and Tyler Toffoli.
That will be six different linemates in three games for Caufield as he tries to find his footing at the NHL level. If not for injuries, Patrice Bergeron wouldn’t have had six different linemates in the past six years. Consistency builds chemistry which is key in the NHL.
It’s time for Ducharme to pick forward lines he likes and give them some time to work together.
The craziest part about all of this line shuffling up front, is Ducharme wouldn’t dare change his top four defence pairing if his life depended on it. I’d be absolutely shocked if we ever saw Ben Chiarot and Shea Weber split apart and stunned if Joel Edmundson played with anyone other than Jeff Petry.
The pairings were only changed when Chiarot was injured. When healthy, Chiarot has played every single game with Weber. When they’ve been together, Petry has always played with Edmundson.
Chiarot’s played 474 minutes of even strength ice time with Weber this season. His next most frequent partner is Edmundson and they have played less than 50 minutes together. They take the odd shift with each other after Weber and Petry are on the power play, but that is it. Aside from that Ducharme, and Julien before him, are completely married to a Chiarot-Weber and Edmundson-Petry top four.
God forbid this team tries to give Alexander Romanov a single game in the top four. How dare they put Brett Kulak back with Petry, a pairing that was key to the Habs beating the Pittsburgh Penguins in last year’s Play-In round.
It’s an odd dichotomy where Ducharme won’t change a thing on defence and won’t keep anything together up front. It’s clearly not working for him, as the team can’t score at all. It might be time to change his approach and actually let a few forwards work together for a few games and experiment a little bit with different defence pairings.