After an interesting first week, the Montreal Canadiens had a somewhat disappointing showing in their second week of action.

They started by losing to the Pittsburgh Penguins 6-3 where the inexperience of the team clearly cost them against the oldest team in the NHL (someone should remind Evgeni Malkin  that he’s 38 years old!).

Next, the Canadiens faced a Kings team that got crushed by the Leafs the previous night. The Habs responded with their worst effort of the season, losing 4-1 without ever feeling they truly had a chance to win this one.

Finally, a much better effort came forth from the team while facing the Islanders on Saturday. Even so, the Habs came away with only a single point from a 4-3 shootout loss. New-York finally won the game in the 9th round of the shootout.

While there’s definitely a silver lining to these games (especially the last one), we shouldn’t underestimate the weight of these losses on a young group that’s hoping to improve on last season’s results.

Troubles on defense

The lack of experience on the blueline is showing. Not that it wasn’t expected by everyone entering the season with only two real veteran players patrolling the blueline, but it was a key point of the season to see these young players improve for the team to remain competitive for as long as possible. 

The Canadiens also needed Mike Matheson and David Savard to play their best to help them keep the young defense core together in difficult situations.

So far, Lane Hutson looks as good as you could hope a rookie to look, Kaiden Guhle was the Habs best defender before he got injured (thankfully the latest report claims he’ll be back sooner than later) and to a lesser extent, I think Justin Barron hasn’t looked out of place, either. 

Savard, with the exception of the game against Pittsburgh, has been a stabilizing force on the defense as well.

These positive notes are somewhat shadowed by the plays of other players. Everybody loves Arber Xhekaj and his role on the team, but he needs to become a better defenseman to justify him staying in the lineup or even in the NHL. So far, he’s been the weakest Habs defenseman and his performance has forced Martin St. Louis to try and find some sort of combination that would make him less of a liability. It's been without much success unfortunately.

Thankfully, the return of Jayden Struble will give some time to “Wifi” to find his own game as he’s clearly the odd man out until another defenseman begins to falter. Then there’s also the play of Mike Matheson. After acting and looking like a bonafide top pairing defenseman last season, we’ve seen far too many weak plays and turnovers coming from Matheson’s stick. 

With the amount of mistakes you’d expect from the rest of the team’s young defense, you NEED Matheson to be better and more reliable every time he jumps on the ice. Perhaps the injury that forced him out of the game against the Kings is something that’s been bothering him for a while. Be that as it may, if he keeps being sent out there for more than 20 minutes a night, we’ll need to see some improvement from him moving forward. 

I’ve been a big fan of Matheson since Montreal acquired him from Pittsburgh and I’m convinced we’ll eventually see the best version of this player down the line. It cannot be too far down the line, however.

One quick note on Logan Mailloux who played his first game of the season against the Islanders. The young defenseman didn’t look out of place at all on Saturday, not only by his strong defensive play but managed to contribute offensively with his first NHL goal. If Mailloux manages to keep that level of play for the next few games, perhaps he’s not the one that will be taking the orange line back to Laval once Guhle is set to return.

The missing second line

Despite the powerplay being in the top tier of the NHL and Cole Caufield being on a clearly sustainable pace for 82 goals this season, Montreal remains a bottom tier team when it comes to offensive contribution.

It’s hard not to point to the Newhook-Dach-Armia line as the missing contributors to the Habs success. A great amount of expectations were on Kirby Dach after his strong training camp a year ago before his season was cut short after only four periods of play and perhaps we’ll need to remain patient with the young man. He did miss an entire season of play and his injury (torn ACL/MCL) is something that can take its toll on a players for a while.

Right now though, that line simply isn’t giving what we expected of it. With higher expectations from management and the coaching staff in actual results this season, it’ll be interesting to see how Martin St-Louis acts upon his missing second line.

Personally, I would first try to put a player next to Dach and Newhook that has impressed me since entering the lineup: Emil Heineman.

“Monsieur Emile” has two goals since the beginning of the season in a bottom 6 role (that’s twice the amount of the whole second line by the way!) and I feel like his intensity, physicality and his impressive shot could help get the other two young forwards on that line get started.

There’s also the possibility of trying out Newhook at centre since he played his best hockey last year at that position, but I don’t feel we are there just yet as Montreal really wants Dach to become that very important second line centre piece in their rebuild.

The Canadiens will need an even better effort from everyone if they hope to remain near a playoff spot in the next few weeks. Because despite some interesting improvement, it’s easy to tell this team cannot afford to dig themselves into a hole so early as they would most likely
lack the resources to get out of it.

Thank you all for reading and have a nice day.

Hugo Brossoit (Scabeh)

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