The Montreal Canadiens 2021-22 season is going horribly. They lost again last night to drop their overall record to 6-21-3.
Last night’s loss was their 7th in a row and after playing 30 games, they have won just six of them. So, they win every fifth game they play which puts them on pace for 16 over the course of a full season.
They can point to injuries not helping, but this team looks worse than just a squad that is missing a couple of key veterans. They look like a team that doesn’t know how to play hockey correctly.
Veteran defenceman Jeff Petry was one of those players that battled injuries but he returned to the lineup last night after missing four games. Petry is not having a great season either, with zero goals and just two assists in the 26 games he has played. This is far below his usual output and that is not a unique situation for the Canadiens this year.
After watching four games from the press box, and returning for a 5-2 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins, Petry had some interesting comments after last night’s game.
“It’s the same things, over and over. We’re not playing as a team, we’re not playing as a group. It’s like you’re searching to find where people are. It seems like there’s no structure out there.” - Jeff Petry
— Arpon Basu (@ArponBasu) December 15, 2021
“You watch it up top and there’s times where you’re scratching your head. It feels like everybody knows where we should be, but we’re not going to those places, we’re not making it easy for anybody on the ice except, most of the time, the other team.” - Jeff Petry, again.
— Arpon Basu (@ArponBasu) December 15, 2021
With Shea Weber out for the season, Carey Price yet to play a game, Brendan Gallagher currently away from the team due to Covid-19 and Corey Perry having signed elsewhere in the offseason, Jeff Petry is a major voice in the Canadiens dressing room. He’s been a good player and a respected veteran all along, but in the absence of so many great leaders from last season, players are looking up to Petry more than ever.
HIs words last night are strong and suggest this team has no structure at all after 30 games together. A 34 year old like Petry going to the media and saying things like “we don’t play as a team”, “You’re searching to find where people are out there” and ” you watch it up top and scratch your head.”
Those are pretty significant comments coming from Petry. This is a terrible look for the team’s coaching staff, especially head coach Dominique Ducharme.
Ducharme took over as head coach midway through last season and guided the team to an unsteady 15-16-7 record to finish the regular season. After pretty much nailing down a playoff spot in the first month of the season, the team barely limped into the Canadian Division postseason.
They of course took off then and made it to the Stanley Cup Final.
But it has been a cold dose of reality as we returned to the regular season. The Canadiens have the second worst record in the NHL at 6-21-3 which means Ducharme’s record as the team’s head coach in the regular season is a combined 21-37-10.
That’s bad enough, but the most respected veteran on the team calling out the team’s structure and inability to play as a team in the middle of the regular season is an even worse look.
Ducharme was guaranteed to keep his job through the regular season by Jeff Gorton and Geoff Molson when the former was hired as the team’s Executive Vice President of Hockey Operations.
That’s probably true, because the team is still paying former head coach Claude Julien through this season. If they fired Ducharme and brought in another bench boss, they’d be paying three head coaches this season and that’s just not smart financially. The season’s already over as far as playoff contention goes so just let Ducharme continue to steer things into the ditch for a couple more months.
But, there was already little chance Ducharme would be coaching this team in 2022-23. Petry’s comments just might have been the final nail in Ducharme’s coaching coffin.