Montreal Canadiens: Trying to Fix the Broken Offence

This Montreal Canadiens season is only about a week and a half old, but it already feels like forever. In succession, the Canadiens have lost to the Toronto Maple Leafs 2-1, the Buffalo Sabres 5-1, the New York Rangers 3-1, the San Jose Sharks 5-0, and the Carolina Hurricanes 4-1. The Maple Leafs and Hurricanes look to be good teams this year, the Rangers are a young middling team on the rise, and the San Jose Sharks and Buffalo Sabres should be bad, but don’t look like it so far.

The Canadiens did beat the Detroit Red Wings 6-1 on the back of a hat-trick by Mathieu Perreault and Mike Hoffman’s first goal as a Canadien. And while that is all really great, it is one good game against five bad ones. It could be a great start to a good run, but this is also the Detroit Red Wings we are talking about, a team that was supposed to be bad and actually seems to be bad, unlike the Buffalo Sabres and San Jose Sharks.

So for those keeping score, that five game start was an 0-5 start, with 4 goals for and 19 against. That is 3.8 goals against per game, 0.8 goals per. In the first 5 games, Montreal has failed to score 2 goals in one game, and has struggled to even threaten to. The closest they came was when Gallagher looked to score the first goal in the Carolina game, but it was called back as goaltender interference.

Offence was a question during the preseason, where there were long stretches of up to 13 minutes, Montreal could not take a shot. In the San Jose game, Montreal only took 4 shots in the first period where San Jose got 3 goals. They escaped out of the first period of the Carolina game scoreless, but only managed to take 5 shots. Montreal retook the shot gap in both the Carolina and San Jose game, but it was when the game was already out of reach.

This is a very different look to the Montreal Canadiens that we have seen in the recent years. It really seemed to start the year that Marc Bergevin brought in Max Domi and Jesperi Kotkaniemi. This was a team that was not the best in the league, but fought for every second on the ice and was tons of fun doing it. It is a mentality personified by Brendan Gallagher and has persisted the past few years to make a team that is generally fun to watch.

That has not been the case this year.

There has been little fight this year, especially in the offensive zone. Its not that Montreal has lost 5 games in a row to start the season, its that they have hardly threatened to win or look interesting or entertaining at all.

And that is the difficulty with trying to fix this offence. Usually there are players that are playing well and you can put them together to try to spark something. But who has been good? The second line of Josh Anderson – Christian Dvorak – Jonathan Drouin has been the only bright spot, and it hasn’t been perfect. The rest? Well, let’s just change a few things.