The Montreal Canadiens are playing their best hockey of the 2021-22 season.
The wins are finally piling up for the team, and they don’t resemble the team that struggled mightily to look like an NHL team for the entire first half of the season. At least, they don’t resemble that team on the ice.
One thing the Martin St. Louis coached version of the Montreal Canadiens has in common with the team Dominique Ducharme coached to begin the season is the long list of injuries both coaches had to deal with.
The Canadiens looked like they are about to get much healthier in the coming days. Jake Evans, Jonathan Drouin, Christian Dvorak, Joel Edmundson and Paul Byron have all returned to practice. Each of them are sporting a non-contact jersey and all of them, aside from Evans, have been out long term so they aren’t likely to play this week but they are certainly getting closer to a return.
Then, just as we finally thought the team was getting healthy, we were surprised with the news that Jeff Petry was also wearing a non-contact jersey at practice.
Luckily, this one doesn’t sound like anything serious. The team announced Petry was day-to-day with an upper body injury.
Of course, we thought that Carey Price and Joel Edmundson were day to day at the beginning of training camp and they are both still out with the same injuries five months later.
Hopefully Petry’s injury doesn’t linger as long as his goaltender or defence partner’s have. he played 22:09 in the Habs most recent game, a 5-2 win over the Edmonton Oilers, but that ranked 4th among the team’s defencemen as Alexander Romanov, Ben Chiarot and Brett Kulak all played (slightly) more.
The Canadiens do not play until Wednesday night when they face the Vancouver Canucks and their next game after that isn’t until Saturday.
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