Montreal Canadiens: We Should Have Expected Slow Start, But it Won’t Last

The Montreal Canadiens came into the 2021-22 season as Stanley Cup finalists. It didn’t take long for them to drop from an enviable position to the bottom of the NHL standings.

The Habs have lost their first five games of the season and two of them were particularly ugly.

Losing to the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Rangers is one thing, but getting embarrassed by the Buffalo Sabres and San Jose Sharks is as close to embarrassment as you can get in the NHL.

But maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised by the Canadiens tough start. They had an incredible amount of change over the offseason and it would have been nearly impossible to hit the ground running. I don’t know that we should have expected them to look quite as bad as they did against San Jose and Buffalo, but it wouldn’t have been wise to expect a quick start.

The Canadiens lost some key components to their Stanley Cup Final run shortly after the season ended.

Shea Weber is out for the entire season with various injuries. Joel Edmundson is not in the lineup yet as he dealt with injuries himself and his ailing father. Phillip Danault signed with the Los Angeles Kings. Tomas Tatar moved on to the New Jersey Devils. Jesperi Kotkaniemi took the money and ran to Carolina. Paul Byron is injured. Corey Perry and Eric Staal left as free agents.

Add it all up and there are just a lot of familiar faces out of town. Weber, Edmundson, Danault and Byron were huge parts of the team’s penalty killing unit that was so good in the postseason but none of them are playing right now. Tatar, Kotkaniemi, Perry and Staal were spread out over the bottom three lines and just leave the team with little familiarity out of the gate.

In fact, the only line that was still intact to begin this season was the Nick Suzuki, Tyler Toffoli and Cole Caufield line. None of the team’s defence pairings from the postseason are still together either.

Most importantly, goaltender Carey Price is out of the lineup as he is in the NHL/NHLPA player assistance program for the month of October.

That’s the team’s starting goaltender, two top four defenders, and six regular forwards from the postseason lineup that are no longer in town, or are currently injured.

Bringing in Christian Dvorak, the return of Jonathan Drouin, and adding Mike Hoffman, Mathieu Perreault, David Savard and Chris Wideman should help fill the void opened up in the offseason. But it is going to take time.

Developing chemistry with new linemates and defence partners doesn’t happen overnight. The Canadiens clearly haven’t started clicking just yet. They will, it just won’t happen in the first handful of games.

There are a lot of talented players on the team, they just need a little time to develop some chemistry. Hopefully it doesn’t take much longer because this season could slip away in the next couple of weeks if things don’t turn around.

But with all the changes, and all the key penalty killers and leaders leaving town or being injured, there really is no surprise this team is performing the way they have.