The Montreal Canadiens are near the top of the NHL standings, but the Eastern Conference is so strong that they’re also just a small losing skid away from being out of a playoff spot. It’s a bizarre set up this season with clubs in the west in the playoffs with barely a .500 record.
The Canadiens didn’t want two games without a win to turn into three, but the Senators needed a win considering where they stand. Ottawa knew they had to be strong and they were, but they couldn’t get a save. The Canadiens scored two in the last four minutes, and one in overtime to win 6-5.
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The moments of Montreal excellence looked better thanks to poor Ottawa goaltending. Josh Anderson scored, and he was thrilled, no doubt. But it was a 55 footer with about 55 miles per hour on the shot.
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Cole Caufield looked great, too, with his 23rd goal of the season, but a better goalie probably also stops that one between the legs.
Juraj Slafkovsky then took over. He ripped a one-time shot into the top corner for his 18th of the season. Later, Slafkovsky was in front of the net for a deflection and scored number 19. There are 33 games left this year, and Slafkovsky is only one short of his career high.
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This is, without a doubt, a break-out season for Slafkovsky. He is only 21 years of age. The organization showed guts drafting him first overall when the hockey world thought the right pick was Shane Wright. Wright has only 16 points. He plays on the third line in Seattle. Slafkovsky is the number one scoring forward for Montreal over the past month.
The second Slafkovsky goal was with an extra attacker as head coach Martin St. Louis pulled the goalie with just under five minutes remaining. For Slafkovsky, it was a remarkable 20th point in his last 15 games. Only one Canadiens player is hotter: Lane Hutson had three assists for 22 points in the last 16 games.
Slafkovsky’s goal made it 5-4, but the Canadiens still needed one more. They got it when Ivan Demidov found Alexandre Carrier for a one-time slap-shot. He ripped it top shelf to force overtime.
That’s when Caufield took over yet again in the three-on-three. There may not be a better player in this facet of the NHL than Caufield. He chose shot on a two-on-one for his second of the night and 24th of the season. It completed an improbable comeback for Montreal, which scored six goals on 19 shots.
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The Canadiens are an exciting club to watch. They are one of the most exciting in the league with the third highest total of goals for in the league.
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The Canadiens victory masked the fact that they actually played poorly this week. They didn’t have their brains in the game in Buffalo. They were outplayed and outworked in Ottawa. The Canadiens did not match the Senators energy.
However, goaltending is a giant part of hockey, and the Senators don’t have any this season. Ottawa has tried four goalies this year and the best of them has an .881 save percentage in Linus Ullmark, and he left the team for personal reasons.
Leevi Merilainen was in the net for the Senators, and he was abysmal. He faced only 10 shots in the first two periods and let in three. The Canadiens should have never won, but when the goalie has a save percentage of .684, there’s obviously a chance. The final shots favoured Ottawa 34-19.
Here are the Corsi numbers for the Canadiens lines: The Nick Suzuki line was best at 50 per cent; Jake Evans’ line was 45; Phillip Danault’s line was 36 per cent; Oliver Kapanen’s line was 33 . Only a line centred by Suzuki has been over 50 per cent consistently this season.
The hope, inside the organization, is that either the team is tired and needs a break, or the returning players such as Patrik Laine, Kirby Dach, and Alex Newhook will be an injection of talent that makes a difference.
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Last season, the second line was a black hole, while the back-six was excellent. This season, the bottom two lines are struggling. They tried Danault to help change those fortunes, but it is not working out, except in the face-off circle. Danault is already a minus-seven in only 12 games.
The worst plus-minus on the club is Evans with a minus-13. Obviously, these two centres get the difficult defensive-zone starts, but the best defensive centres in the league handle those d-zone starts and tough match-ups against the best players.
The Canadiens can be stronger. There is talent arriving. Let’s see what that talent coming means to the overall, because the Canadiens are 28th in the league in goals allowed. They are 26th in save percentage. They need more on the defensive side of the puck.
If all of the lines had an excellent Corsi this season, but the save percentage was poor, then blame would fall squarely on the goaltending. However, too much of the game is in Montreal’s zone, so the issues run deeper than the difficulty of getting a save.
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The three-goalie system was untenable. There simply is not enough net for three goalies to maintain their solid play. One had to go, and it makes perfect sense that the one was Jacob Fowler who was sent back down to Laval of the American Hockey League.
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Fowler should not consider his first foray into the NHL as a failure by any measure. Statistically, it was a solid run for 10 games. Surface statistics had Fowler with a save percentage of .902 and a goals against average of 2.62. These are strong numbers. Jakub Dobes has an .888 and Samuel Montembeault is only .874.
The deeper statistic, and the true go-to number for goaltenders, is Goals Saved Above Expected. Fowler truly shines in this category. Fowler checked in with a positive 1.8. He’s the only Canadiens goalie with a positive number.
Dobes and Montembeault have actually hurt the team with their work. Dobes is a -1.6 and Montembeault is -6.0. This means, overall, that looking at the speed of a shot, where it was taken, the traffic in front of the net, Montembeault should have stopped six goals he let in this season.
Montembeault has been in 19 games. This is essentially letting in a bad goal every three games. That’s points lost in the standings. However, Montembeault has been better recently, so he is trending to a better second half which he can achieve easier with more games played to get consistent.
Fowler heads to Laval knowing he can handle the NHL shot, but he needs to play more. He can’t be a developing goalie seeing only 30 games this season. He follows the footsteps of most goalies this century not arriving at 21 years of age.
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It’s extremely rare to start at 21 in the NHL and stick the landing. Only Carey Price, Marc-Andre Fleury, Cam Ward, and Andrei Vasilevskiy started at 21 and stayed in the league this century. Spencer Knight and Carter Hart were close, but ran into off-ice issues. Knight, at 24, finally seems ready to stay now. Hart is still in the wilderness.
Yaroslav Askarov was supposed to be good enough to get a clear path, but he’s only just arriving to the NHL for good with San Jose at the age of 23, yet his save percentage is only .891.
A good recent example of a common top-prospect goalie path is Dustin Wolf in Calgary. At 22, Wolf was on the AHL’s Stockton Heat. At 23, he got a 17 game sniff for the Flames, but then back down to the minors for the rest of the season. At 24, he finished a season in the NHL.
Many others in Fowler’s age group are still finding their way. Highly touted goalies not getting a chance yet like Sebastian Cossa at Grand Rapids, Michael Hrabal at UMass-Amherst, Trey Augustine at Michigan State.
To be 21 and arrive for good in the NHL basically doesn’t happen. Goalies need time and practice to refine their techniques. They also need a good goalie coach and they have one in Laval in Marco Marciano. Fowler, at 21, showed he belongs in the NHL. Now he’ll put in the work to do more than belong, but excel when he returns.
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Brian Wilde, a Montreal-based sports writer, brings you Call of the Wilde on globalnews.ca after each Canadiens game.
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