Montreal Canadiens: Three Things We Have Learned So Far

Oh Dear Lord. This season has gone from bad to worse to somehow even worse to this could be the worst 82 game season in Montreal Canadiens history.

But there are things that we can learn. Patterns, cause and effect, and assumptions that can help us learn from this abysmal season and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

And by abysmal I mean abysmal. The Marianas Trench has nothing on how low the Montreal Canadiens have gone this year. And simply put, there is no digging out of it this year.

We are going to try to steer away from the more obvious observations: The Montreal Canadiens are bad; this shows how important Carey Price is to the team for like the 5th time; the defence is in shambles and can’t stop a tumbleweed; Jeff Gorton should just blow up the team and start fresh with just a few select guys.

Those are all truths and very easy to see. It will be tough, but this team is in need of a rebuild, but the nice thing is that Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki are still young enough to be a part of that rebuild, and the young talent already a part of the system is pretty good. Mattias Norlinder (who just recently got sent back to the SHL for the year thank God) didn’t look awful in the NHL, just inexperienced. Jesse Ylonen looks good and just scored his first NHL goal. The Young Tsar Alexander Romanov has been one of the lone bright spots on the team this year.

But everything else?

Jeff Petry is in the middle of the worst season in his entire career. Jake Allen has been hung out to dry all season and has been doing his best just to stem the tide. Joel Edmunson and Paul Byron have yet to see the ice this year, and even if Carey Price and Shea Weber could return, why would they?

But, lets try to salvage some sort of lesson from this year so far

Nick Suzuki is Not Ready to Be A Top Line Centre

I hate to say this because it is totally not his fault at all, but most of the hopes and dreams of the Montreal faithful this year rested on Nick Suzuki being capable of shouldering top line minutes, and being able to handle playing against the best lines the opponents have to offer. Something he hasn’t had to do in years previous because he had help from other centres on the team.

But its clear from the moves that Marc Bergevin made in the offseason, that he thought Suzuki was ready to take that step. Yup, we are still talking about Bergevin, and will be for some while, because the effects that he had on this team will ripple onwards for years.

To give credit where it is due, Suzuki’s new contract could be one of the best moves Bergevin made period. Definitely the best he made this offseason. Signed early and to under $8 million that goes up to the end of 2030. Beautiful. Its important to get it early, because if Suzuki had a fantastic season this season (again, what the team was banking on), then you have to pay him that much more, and you have to worry about poachers like the Carolina Hurricanes swooping in on fell wings.

The rest of the offseason was a trainwreck, and it is arguable if it was completely Bergevin’s fault. At least at the centre position. At least to me.

Phillip Danault is the best defensive centre in the league. Full stop. He may never win the Selke, simply because he doesn’t put up enough points, which is stupid. There are defensive forwards, like his now teammate Anze Kopitar, Patrice Bergeron or Sacha Barkov, who play well defensively but still put up a ton of points. Well, purely defensively, Danault blows them out of the water in my opinion.

He didn’t just completely destroy Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner for a game. He did it for a whole series. And it wasn’t just one series, it was the whole playoffs. One of the reasons Tampa Bay won the Cup was because Lightning head coach Jon Cooper outcoached Dominic Ducharme (like that’s some sort of mean feat), and got his first line of Kucherov – Point – Palat away from Danault.

But, its not as easy to say that Bergevin just let Danault walk out. It depends on how much value you see in a pure shutdown defenceman. Bergevin had tried to sign Danault before last year began, to the tune of $5 million for 6 years. Danault declined and many people ridiculed Bergevin for being willing to pay so much on Danault. It depends on how much mileage you can get out of a purely defensive forward.

And then Danault predictably signed elsewhere, with the L.A. Kings for $5.5 million for 6 years, with no move clauses put into place. Its hard to see people praising Bergevin for making this deal, and there would be so much blame put on this deal if the season still turned out this way. Bergevin would have at least needed to match this amount, and set Montreal back monetarily for a long time.

And then there was the Jesperi Kotkaniemi debacle. Its impossible to predict at the end of the year that Kotkaniemi would have been paid more this year than Phillip Danault. There was so much that went into this situation, his benching at the end of the Tampa series, Bergevin putting of resigning Kotkaniemi as a restricted free agent, Kotkaniemi returning to Finland for family business, and Bergevin signing Carolina Hurricanes star Sebastian Aho to an offer sheet that was matched.

I could not imagine the uproar that would have came up if Kotkaniemi was still a Canadien for $6 million. Carolina Hurricane fans have been quick to point out that Kotkaniemi has 6 goals, which would put him second on the Canadiens right now in goals, behind Josh Anderson (who has missed time with injury), and tied with Nick Suzuki. But, if you think that Kotkaniemi would put up these numbers on a terrible Montreal team, you are sorely mistaken.

Eric Staal was the fourth line centre in the playoffs, and anchored a really good energy line with Corey Perry and Joel Armia. If Montreal needed momentum, Ducharme could put out that line, and they would have offensive zone time, good chances, and often times, especially in the Winnipeg series, they scored goals.

Staal is 37 years old, and has not signed with any NHL team so far this year. It is looking more and more like he is considering retiring, so there was nothing that Bergevin could do to bring him back.

Plus, Staal was less than stellar in his regular season time in Montreal. In my first article on this site, a somewhat dooming statement was made that he will score a goal and register a point. But Staal came dangerously close to making this lowball prediction not come true, with just 2 goals and 3 points. But, he added some leadership on the lower end of the roster, which is something that we will get to later.

So that leaves centres Nick Suzuki and Jake Evans left. Jake Evans has been good this season, despite the turmoil surrounding the season. He already has a career high in goals with 4, and has shown an offensive flair that wasn’t in his game before. Its just that it is happening in the worst Montreal Canadiens seasons in history.

Nick Suzuki has also not been as terrible as the season has let on. Earlier, he was hovering just under a point-per-game, but has seen some drop off in production, possibly due to the insane amount of injuries this team has, and a lack of consistent, quality, scoring teammates. But still, he is near the top of the team list in goals with 6, and he tops the team with 18 points.

It is clear watching Suzuki play this year that he is still a very good, very young hockey player, that will become great some day on a better Montreal team than this. He still has number 1 centre potential, but he is not that yet. But Bergevin, and the Montreal Canadiens as a whole, needed Suzuki to be a number 1 centre this year to compete. But it is clear that he will get there, someday.

Dominique Ducharme Has Lost the Room

First of all, lets explain what losing the room means. Everyone has their own quirks, manners of speaking and tactics on how to get a reaction from people. But, after a while, those quirks become more annoying, and those tactics become less and less effective. Its enevitable, everything decays in its own time.

Every team hits adversity and the coach has to pull the team out of the funk, but eventually it begins to fall on deaf ears. Its kind of like middle school. If you had the same teacher each year, teaching the same things the same ways, eventually you begin to tune out and it becomes less effective.

There is no shame in losing the room. Almost every single coach has done it at some point. Just recently, Paul Maurice of the Winnipeg Jets stepped down on his own volition due to this very fact, and he was the youngest coach to coach 1,000 games.

And losing the room is not a death sentence. When Al MacNeil was coach of the Canadiens in the 1970-71 season after Claude Ruel resigned. The Canadiens made a miraculous turn around, and won the Stanley Cup. However, MacNeil had some terrible relationships with the players, especially those that spoke French, since he didn’t and was accused of favouring English speaking players. But, that was all overcome and they won it all.

Its still extremely early, but it seems like Dominique Ducharme is not a great coach.

I am somewhat hesitant to say that because it is so early and the season has gone so poorly and the injuries have been so bad. But then the Jeff Petry interview came out.

Jeff Petry has been having an atrocious season, and as Montreal’s best defender before this season, the defensive corps has just sunk. But these comments shed some very important light on what is going on behind closed doors. There is no structure. The players don’t know what they are doing and where they are supposed to be. And in a game that is as fast paced as hockey, taking an extra second to find your teammate, means that the opponents have already passed you by.

And that is largely on the coach. There is chemistry between players that know exactly where each other would be and work perfectly together. The line of Brendan Gallagher – Phillip Danault – Tomas Tatar had that in spades, and it made them a nightmare to play against. But as a coach, you cannot assume that that will be the case, and have to put together systems that work and the players know.

But to do that, the coach has to have good ideas, and the players have to be willing to listen to them and apply those systems. And its either one or the other with Ducharme, and neither of them bodes well. There is something wrong with this team, and Petry seems to be pointing directly to Ducharme as the root of the issue.

Ducharme is a first year head coach at this level, taking over for the fired Claude Julien partway through the year last year. The team treads water until the playoffs, where they get stomped by the heavily favoured Toronto Maple Leafs to a 3-1 series deficit. But then the rest is history, as the team wins 7 straight and makes the Stanley Cup Final.

At the time, I believed that Dominique Ducharme had outcoached the Leafs’ Sheldon Keefe. It wasn’t a strange assumption. A team doesn’t come back from a 3-1 series hole without changing something, and I had attributed that to a new defensive structure that the Canadiens’ employed. They clogged the neutral zone, and gave the skilled Toronto Maple Leafs no room to work.

But now, it seems like that may have not been the case. Rumors started swirling that Shea Weber and Corey Perry were coaching the team, not Ducharme, and that he was just a figurehead. That seems to be the case, since Ducharme missed a big chunk of the series against the Vegas Golden Knights, and the team still produced. At the time, it was like the team was rallying around their sick coach, but now?

Everyone has given up. The fans have come to terms that this is a lost season. The players have given up on the coach, or so it seems. We don’t know what is going on behind closed doors.

I am not entirely confident in saying that Dominique Ducharme is a bad hockey coach. I know that Ducharme has lost the room, and that makes him a bad coach for this team.