MONTREAL — When a team gives up three goals in the first seven minutes, it’s very tempting to say they were not ready to start the game.
But this was not the case for the Montreal Canadiens on Tuesday. They were very ready to start the game.
After a ceremony honouring the dynasty team from the late 1970s, the Canadiens started the line of Jake Evans, Brendan Gallagher and Josh Anderson, hoping they would spend some time in the offensive zone and set the tone for the next shift, and that the Canadiens would go from there.
Early in the shift, that’s exactly what they did.
They snuffed out a New York Rangers incursion into their zone relatively quickly, executed a very efficient and effective zone exit and zone entry, worked the puck around the offensive zone and manufactured an excellent scoring chance when Evans found Lane Hutson for a one-timer that could have easily been his first career NHL goal.
Instead, the shot hit Jacob Trouba in the leg. And that’s when everything fell apart.
IT. TAKES. EVERYONE. pic.twitter.com/nIRZFgZG9F
— New York Rangers (@NYRangers) October 22, 2024
Despite being at the end of a long shift where they defended a lot, the Rangers moved up ice efficiently and set up in the Canadiens’ zone. Hutson was trying desperately to get back, and in his desperation didn’t realize the Canadiens largely had him covered deep in their own zone. What they needed from him in that moment was to handle the second wave, and he didn’t; he continued on deep into his own zone and the Rangers scored.
Instead of being up 1-0, the Canadiens were down 1-0, and it was because of a rookie mistake.
“It was just a small thing that first shift that we do all the time that we didn’t, and that ended up in the back of our net and put us on our heels,” Nick Suzuki said without naming Hutson.
The second Rangers goal came a little over a minute later when both Logan Mailloux, another rookie, and Jayden Struble, playing his 58th career game, slowed up on an apparent icing and allowed Adam Edström to beat it and set up Jonny Brodzinski to score. The third goal came on an inexcusable turnover by Hutson at his own blue line to Reilly Smith, who beat Sam Montembeault easily.
“Failure is probably the best lesson you can get for getting better,” Suzuki said. “I mean, there’s stuff that happened in my rookie year that I know that I was the one that messed up for a goal and it almost haunts you that you don’t want to do that again. I think they’ll just learn from that and it’s easy fixes.”
When your team’s goal is to raise the standard and play meaningful games in March, but your team is this young and therefore prone to game-changing mistakes, the calculus changes.
It’s almost a paradox.
Rookie mistakes are to be expected when you are dressing so many rookies — there were four in uniform Tuesday — and you are missing important players like Kaiden Guhle and Juraj Slafkovský, 22 and 20, respectively, but both crucial pieces to this team’s success.
And with rookie mistakes come rookie losses, like this.
When that’s true, when rookie losses are just a byproduct of dressing so many rookies, it might seem unreasonable to have heightened expectations. But that’s exactly what the Canadiens have.
“We’ve just got to realize, the last few years, it’s not that much fun playing hockey at the end when you’re out of it,” Evans said after the 7-2 loss to the Rangers. “You want to play some meaningful games. So I think everyone’s got to realize that.
“It’s tough with rookies sometimes in certain situations, but we’ve just got to help them out and make them realize losing isn’t acceptable anymore.”
Last season, coach Martin St. Louis often said the Canadiens could not get lost in the results. The process was more important. But when you want to play meaningful games in March, results matter. And this result hurt.
Tuesday morning, St. Louis talked about how he liked what he was seeing, how it’s too early in the season to get bogged down in the data, and how the little adjustments the Canadiens were making were showing up in their performance.
That’s what makes this result hurt, because the Canadiens don’t play again until Saturday, and instead of working on building their game, this result will force St. Louis to take a step back and fix what’s not working.
“Yeah, I’m very disappointed with the result,” St. Louis said. “I’m probably going to go home, probably going to watch the game, and I’ll have a plan tomorrow. Because there’s nothing we can do tonight about tonight. That game is over. Now, it’s what’s next that’s important. It’s the repair. How are we going to repair some of these things? Falling asleep on an icing, I’m sure it’ll get addressed. There’s other parts of the game (where) we have to be better. Some of it is collectively, but some of it is individually.
“So for me, I look at the next three days to, you know, repair, collectively and individually. We don’t play until Saturday, so I hope that Saturday we’re a better version of ourselves. And that starts not with what happened tonight — that’s going to be part of the equation — but it’s what we do the next two or three days here.”
Repairing collectively and individually is … a lot of repairing in two or three days.
For this result to come against the Rangers is particularly poignant, because the Canadiens, in many ways, are seeking to emulate what the Rangers are. When owner Geoff Molson fired Marc Bergevin and hired Jeff Gorton to serve as his executive vice president of hockey operations, it was largely based on how he guided the Rangers through their own rebuild as general manager and how quickly he made them competitive.
Gorton has repeatedly stated that he sees similarities between what the Canadiens are going through and what the Rangers were facing back then. And the Rangers being the team St. Louis finished his playing career with makes them that much more pertinent to him, as well.
The Rangers sent out their famous letter to fans announcing their rebuild on Feb. 8. 2018. They missed the playoffs that year, and in each of the next three years before reaching the Eastern Conference final in Year 4 of their rebuild. That was in 2022, and they haven’t missed the playoffs since.
Gorton is roughly a month shy of his three-year anniversary of working for the Canadiens.
“Listen, this is a really good team,” St. Louis said in response to a question about the Rangers’ rebuild. “And you just said it took six years. They’ve been relevant for what, at least I feel like they’ve been a team that’s been talked about for three or four years, maybe? They’ve gone through their process, they are where they are, they’ve gone through their growing pains collectively and some individual with some young players. It’s what that can look like, and that’s what we’re after.
“And sometimes, as you try to get to that, you’re going to be humbled, and tonight was one of those nights where we got humbled a little bit on what we’re actually trying to look like. We might not be there yet, we’ve got to work our way to get to that, and hopefully we get to the point where we’re humbling teams.”
That brings us back to the context of this game, what came before it and what it means to this organization and this city.
The greatness that was on the ice prior to the game, the celebration of a dynasty, is what every Canadiens team is judged against, as unfair as that is. The actual players from those Canadiens teams consider the comparison unfair.
But that’s the reality in this city, and it’s what pushed Molson to trigger this rebuild, to fire Bergevin and hire Gorton, who went on to hire Kent Hughes as general manager and then together hire St. Louis to shepherd this project to fruition.
As Ken Dryden was addressing the Bell Centre crowd before the game, the broadcast cut to a shot of Molson watching, and it would have been precious to know what he was thinking in that moment. Because Molson has noted — in the team’s own behind-the-scenes series titled “The Rebuild” — that he is the lone member of his family to own the Canadiens and not have a Stanley Cup ring.
Dryden noted how rare it is to be surrounded by the best owner, the best GM, the best coach and the best players all at once like those Canadiens teams were, and as Molson heard that, knowing it was his family being referred to as the best owner, did it ever cross his mind whether that is true of his team? Did it cross his mind after watching this game from the front row, right next to the Zamboni entrance, as the Rangers put up a touchdown on his team?
As his Canadiens attempt to navigate this paradox of heightened expectations while icing the second-youngest team in the league, will it cross his mind throughout this season?
There are repairs to be made, and it’s not only on the coach, and it’s not only going to take two or three days. At the season-opening golf tournament, Molson repeatedly mentioned they are only in Year 3 of the rebuild and it will require patience to see the process through.
But what St. Louis noted about the Rangers — how they’re relevant, how they’re a team that gets talked about — is something Molson must crave. It’s not only good for business, but it’s the norm in Montreal to have a relevant hockey team that everyone talks about. It’s what he grew up knowing about this team and his own family.
If the Canadiens don’t reach their carefully crafted goal this season of playing meaningful games in March, of being in the mix — because teams as young as they are rarely are in the mix — will that patience run out?
It’s hard and unfair to make that judgment based on one game, or even the seven games the Canadiens have played thus far at this early stage of the season.
But the mistakes that cost the Canadiens in this one game are indicative of what these Canadiens are right now, a team that is gathering information on what they have and a team that is somewhat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
(Photo of Reilly Smith scoring on the Canadiens: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
