Montreal Canadiens: Three Players Most Responsible For Habs Awful Record
The Montreal Canadiens entered the 2021-22 season coming off the high of a Stanley Cup Final appearance just a few short months ago.
A busy, and unspectacular, offseason, would have left most fans believing the team might get off to a less than ideal start. The team lost Phillip Danault, Tomas Tatar and Jesperi Kotkaniemi to free agency. Shea Weber was injured and out for the entire season. Carey Price and Joel Edmundson were due to miss the beginning of the year as well.
But they weren’t supposed to be quite this terrible.
The team did bring in Christian Dvorak to play second line centre. They added David Savard to fill the defensive presence left by Shea Weber. They also added goal scoring winger Mike Hoffman who should have helped fix an ailing power play. Cole Caufield was here for a full season (or so we thought). Mathieu Perreault, Sami Niku and Chris Wideman were signed to add some depth to the lineup as well.
They weren’t going to just replace Carey Price, Shea Weber and Joel Edmundson, but this team should have been able to score more goals with the additions of Hoffman, Dvorak and Caufield. And with Jake Allen here, he was supposed to fill in admirably for Price during his absence.
That has not been the case. The team has struggled at all facets of the game. They are 29th out of 32 teams in goals per game. They are worse defensively as they rank 30th in the league in goals against. Their special teams are atrocious as they sit at 27th in the NHL on the power play and 29th on the penalty kill.
They have been terrible and now have the third worst record in the league at 5-14-2. Their most impressive win of the season might have been Saturday night’s 6-3 victory over the Nashville Predators. Unfortunately, it was sandwiched by a 6-0 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins and a 6-3 loss to the Washington Capitals.
It wasn’t supposed to be this bad. Even when all the injuries were revealed and the players that left town were gone, no one thought the team would be this bad. So, why are they? You can blame these three players the most.