DETROIT — At various points of every season he has been in Montreal, coach Martin St. Louis hammers home a certain point.
Whether it is playing your game within the game, or the game talks to you, St. Louis emphasizes a steady stream of mantras and philosophies, and they tend to come and go.
During training camp, he stressed the notion that making ordinary plays repeatedly gives you the opportunity to make extraordinary plays, and the term St. Louis says constantly is “collective game.”
This Canadiens’ season is two games old. They lost 5-2 on Wednesday in Toronto and beat the Red Wings 5-1 in their home opener Thursday night. The results couldn’t have been much more different, but in both outings, the way the Canadiens played their collective game was similar.
When asked which of the two games was a better performance, St. Louis couldn’t decide.
“I don’t know. I mean … I don’t know. I’d have to watch,” he said. “I thought we were good in both games.”
Eh bin, comme hier!
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Nick Suzuki couldn’t decide either.
“I think they were too similar,” he said. “We could be 2-0, but that’s how it goes. It’s tough to win in this league. Overall, I thought we had two really sharp games.”
The scoreboard doesn’t always tell the story, in other words, and at this stage of the season, the development of that collective game is almost more important than what the scoreboard says.
In that sense, the Canadiens are 2-for-2, even if they have one win and one loss and have scored seven goals and allowed six. They haven’t been perfect for two games, let’s be real, but overall they are doing what their coach is asking of them. And what’s most telling is how the roster’s newer players have bought in.
It is a sign of where this core group is in Year 4 of this project. Zack Bolduc and Oliver Kapanen each have two goals in two games. Noah Dobson has looked efficient and effective on the top defence pair with Mike Matheson. Ivan Demidov has not tried to do too much, and although he hasn’t created a highlight-reel moment, he hasn’t created any for opposing teams, either.
“I think they’re getting here at a good moment, because we have a lot of continuity with a lot of the players,” St. Louis said. “We’re integrating a few, but they’re not only coached by the coach, they’re coached by the players as well, and they understand.
“We’re very direct in the way we want to play, and the continuity helps us teach it, to hammer down the details.”
A perfect example of that principle was a clear turning point Thursday. It would be impossible for anyone on the Canadiens to watch this play and not learn something.
The Canadiens were up 2-1 when Jake Evans was sent over the boards with a little over a minute left before the first intermission. Not long after he jumped on the ice, the Red Wings entered the Canadiens’ zone and started zipping the puck around. The fourth Red Wings player to touch the puck on that sequence was defenceman Moritz Seider, coming in late and cocked and ready to unleash a one-timer on a scrambling Jakub Dobeš in the Canadiens net.
But Evans was there. He got down on his knees and blocked the shot. Matheson scored 30 seconds later to make it 3-1 Canadiens after one period, and they never looked back.
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Ordinary things hurt sometimes, and Evans was willing to do an ordinary thing that was in fact extraordinarily painful.
His teammates noticed.
“It was impressive,” Suzuki said. “He was put in a tough spot, he made a good read that they were going to hit the late guy and try to stop up. I mean, they made pretty elite plays there, and he ends up with a huge block. That probably saves a goal, who knows? That’s just what he does.”
“That was a huge play in the game,” Brendan Gallagher added. “It looked dangerous the whole way. He saw a lot of one-timer opportunities. But Jake, that’s what he does. He makes big plays at big times.”
Evans was one of only four Canadiens forwards to come out of this game without a point. But he had perhaps the biggest impact of anyone on the game with that one play.
“You can never win a game, but you can lose a game at times, early on,” Gallagher said. “Those are actions that really lead to the end result in the game. Sometimes it happens on your first shift, sometimes it’s your last. You never really know, so you’ve just got to be dialed in. Especially those shifts at the end of the period, they’re really important.
“There’s a reason he was on the ice at that time.”
It’s telling that Gallagher sounded almost as if he were paraphrasing St. Louis in that answer.
“The game requires things to be able to come out with a victory,” St. Louis said of that block. “It requires these actions that are not fun, they hurt, but the game requires that. The hockey game has evolved over the years, but the ingredients to being on the winning side haven’t changed.”
It’s easy to look at a 5-1 win, just like it’s easy to look at a 5-2 loss, and think that’s the story. But an NHL season is long, and at the beginning of a marathon, just like at the beginning of a game, it’s rare you will do things that will win you the race, but there are things that can lose you the race.
The Canadiens experienced that early in the 2024-25 season. Game management was an issue. Puck management was an issue. Defensive zone principles were an issue. And they dug themselves a hole as a result.
Two games into this season, it’s hard to be certain that they won’t dig themselves another hole, but the vibes of this team are decidedly different. The message is getting through, and again, it is telling that St. Louis was less impressed with the Canadiens’ ability to answer after giving up the first goal for the second game in a row than he was with his team’s ability to manage a lead and close a game by making responsible decisions and refusing to play fun hockey.
“I noticed more how we managed things after taking the lead,” St. Louis said. “That’s more of a sign of where we are.”
It is, after all, early in the season, and it’s easy for players to feel tempted to go chasing after cookies when goals seem to be on sale.
Managing games was a big problem last year. That’s changed. The group has evolved, and the players have learned.
After only two games, maybe that will change, but so far this team seems much further ahead than where it was at the same time last year, and the added talent has very little to do with it.
“His message and our buy-in is something that’s been here since day one,” Gallagher said of his coach. “He speaks, we listen.”