The Montreal Canadiens have gotten off to about as bad of a bad as anyone could have possibly imagined.
A five game losing streak right off the bat was finally erased with a big effort against the Detroit Red Wings, but the team has gone 2-5-0 since their first win, including another victory over the Red Wings, and are now 3-10-0 on the season.
It would have been fine to suggest the team would fall short of the Stanley Cup Final and predicting them to miss the playoffs this season would have been a fair assessment, but being one of the worst teams in the entire league was not something many fans or media were guessing for this team.
But that is where they are. The Arizona Coyotes finally got their first win of the season on the weekend, and the Chicago Blackhawks are still stuck at one win so they are definitely worse than the Canadiens, but that’s about it. The Canadiens six points in 13 games played gives them a .231 points percentage and has them on pace for 38 points over the 82 game schedule.
That’s… almost hard to believe even having watched all 13 games. 38 points over a full season is just laughable.
But there are reasons to think this team is going to be a lot better in the near future. For one, no one even finishes with 38 points so they just can’t be that bad over a full season. Also, a couple of key players are returning from injury soon.
Joel Edmundson hasn’t played a game yet but he is back skating in Montreal. Edmundson is not Bobby Orr, and this team could use a Bobby Orr right about now, but he is a steadying presence. Edmundson played a really solid defensive game for the Canadiens last season, and had an underrated ability to move the puck out of the defensive zone with possession. He played huge minutes with Jeff Petry in the top four and with Shea Weber out this season, they need Edmundson more than they even did last year.
Of course, Carey Price is soon to return to the team as well. Price is also not Bobby Orr but he has won a Hart Trophy as league MVP like Orr. That was a few years back and Price isn’t the same “best goalie in the world” player he was in 2015, but his return is certain to settle this team down a bit.
The defensive game is awful and the confidence of this team gets completed shattered with every goal against. The team has always played with confidence in front of Price, shown by their 3.33 goals per game with Price in goal last season and barely over two goals per game with Jake Allen in goal.
Just getting Edmundson and Price back isn’t going to transform this team into an elite group overnight, but how good do they have to be to get back into the playoff race?
It’s hard to predict where the cutoff will be for playoff teams this season. The Canadiens recently finished with 96 points and missed the playoffs, but that would normally be enough. With just six points in 13 games so far, the Canadiens are 90 short of that benchmark right now with 69 games to play.
That means a record of 45-24-0, or 41-20-8 is required to almost guarantee a postseason spot. A team that records 90 points in 69 games is on pace for a 107 point season. That’s certainly not unheard of and the Canadiens last achieved that in 2014-15 when Price was the best player in the world and they had 110 points in the standings.
But this team doesn’t look anything like a 107 point team. They did for 20 minutes against the Vegas Golden Knights on Saturday night, but then they gave it right back over the final 40 minutes and lost 5-2.
It will be difficult to bottle up whatever it was we saw in that first period and Saturday night and bring it consistently over the final 69 games of the season. But weird things can happen sometimes in sports. Teams can flip a switch for seemingly no reason whatsoever, like when the St. Louis Blues went from the bottom of the NHL standings at Christmas to Stanley Cup champions.
It certainly isn’t likely, and if you already wrote off the Canadiens chances of making it anywhere near the postseason, you will likely be proven correct in the end. But 90 points in 69 games is far from impossible.
They will just need vintage Carey Price to walk through that dressing room door in the very near future. A playoff berth is extremely unlikely, but let’s not call it entirely impossible just yet.