{"id":190762,"date":"2025-10-05T04:51:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T04:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/190762\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T04:51:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T04:51:09","slug":"joe-velenos-attention-to-detail-earns-him-roster-spot-with-canadiens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/190762\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Veleno’s attention to detail earns him roster spot with Canadiens"},"content":{"rendered":"

MONTREAL \u2014 Joe Veleno<\/a> took off down the wing and hit the speed burst button right as he was crossing the offensive blue line. The television broadcast clocked him double-clutching from second gear to fourth, going from 26 kilometres per hour up to 34 to open up the space that might enable him to do something special.<\/p>\n

Instead, Veleno just did what the situation called for. He had started the play one-on-two and only marginally improved his odds after stepping on the gas, so when he got into that space, he used it to just get a simple shot on net.<\/p>\n

This five second sequence was among several solid ones Veleno had in Montreal\u2019s final exhibition game. It was the type of sequence that secured his job with the Canadiens months after he signed a one-year deal with them worth a fraction more than the league minimum.<\/p>\n

That $900,000-deal came 15 days after unrestricted free agency started, and all it really represented was a lifeline for the former first-round pick\u2019s NHL career.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Veleno came to Canadiens camp having to grab that lifeline and pull himself up, and the way he managed to do that was by doing exactly what the game asked of him each time he stepped on the ice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought he was excellent tonight,\u201d said coach Martin St. Louis after the Canadiens lost 3-1 to the Ottawa Senators.<\/p>\n

The game sheet read: Joe Veleno: zero goals, zero assists, zero points, even.<\/p>\n

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But the game sheet doesn\u2019t track calculated decisions that increase the percentage of your line winning a shift.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s what St. Louis has been emphasizing to the Canadiens for the better part of a year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s what he talked about with reporters who attended Saturday morning\u2019s skate, and also what he repeated following Saturday night\u2019s game.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think they understand what we\u2019re looking for,\u201d said the coach after he was asked in the morning about the endgame for fringe players still pushing for roster spots with the Canadiens. \u201cI think we communicate that every day in the kind of meetings we have. We do video, we\u2019re not showing highlight reels; we\u2019re talking about the details of the game, the ordinary things that you have to do over and over. Every now and then you get extraordinary things, but it\u2019s not one extraordinary thing that\u2019s going to get you inside the door. It\u2019s how many ordinary actions can you do that helps the collective game and that raises the percentages of us being successful knowing that you\u2019re going to have those moments every now and then that you\u2019re going to do an extraordinary thing. But you can\u2019t just look for extraordinary things. The game is not like that. It happens, but I don\u2019t know when it\u2019s going to give you that.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the game always gives you are situations that force you to make quick calculations. And what it forces you to calculate is just how much risk you can afford to take.<\/p>\n

Veleno consistently making those calculations correctly throughout camp pumped oxygen into his NHL career.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If he continues to make them correctly as the season rolls along, he\u2019ll go from surviving to thriving in a way the Detroit Red Wings hoped he would when they selected him 30th\u00a0overall in the 2018 Draft.<\/p>\n

It may have taken the 25-year-old 306 NHL games to truly understand what it takes to make his mark in this league, but at least he figured it out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think experience is probably the biggest thing, you\u2019re going to need to learn certain things, in terms of details, knowing where you\u2019re going to be, knowing guys’ tendencies, who you\u2019re playing against and who you\u2019re playing with,\u201d Veleno said. \u201cIt comes naturally once you get this many games under your belt, so I\u2019ve really grown from my experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

But many of these young Canadiens have grown from their experiences.<\/p>\n

If that wasn\u2019t apparent through this final pre-season game \u2014 which Brendan Gallagher qualified as one in which the Canadiens didn\u2019t have \u201cA-execution or A-effort\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s been patently obvious through the rest of their camp.<\/p>\n

And camp has been an extension of what we saw from the Canadiens through the end of 2024 and opening months of 2025, with the whole team embracing detailed, \u201cordinary hockey,\u201d and maturing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could tell there was a switch from December on and it just got really contagious,\u201d said St. Louis. \u201cYou make a push, get into the playoffs, get through that first round, you understand how much that\u2019s important. When camp started, we didn\u2019t start over. There\u2019s a continuity. The guys really took that to heart. We started camp with that kind of mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Canadiens are finishing camp with it, too.<\/p>\n

Even the guys not finishing camp with the Canadiens displayed to what extent they\u2019ve adopted the mindset St. Louis wants them to have.<\/p>\n

Cuts will be announced Sunday. They\u2019re almost certain to include Florian Xhekaj<\/a>, Owen Beck and Adam Engstrom<\/a>. And while all three of those players would be justified to feel disappointed about their dreams not being realized, St. Louis pointed out they shouldn\u2019t feel as though they failed.<\/p>\n

Engstrom did anything but fail. His only path to a job on the Canadiens\u2019 blue line was an injury to one of the players locked into one, but he didn\u2019t allow that to stop him from proving he\u2019s ready for one right now.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a gamer,\u201d said St. Louis. \u201cHe\u2019s going to play (NHL) hockey. He played a good game tonight, showed he has everything it takes to play in this league. Won\u2019t be surprised if he has a long career.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one should be surprised if it starts for the young Swede at some point this season.<\/p>\n

Beck has already played 13 games at this level, and his 14th\u00a0will come soon enough.<\/p>\n

Xhekaj\u2019s first might come a little further down the road, but any doubt that he\u2019ll play it sooner than anyone thought he would when he was drafted \u2014 101st\u00a0overall in 2023 \u2014 was erased by his performance in this camp.<\/p>\n

Still, the details must be sharpened, and the calculations made more precisely \u2014 and not just for an unpolished stone like Xhekaj, but also for the most varnished veterans of the Canadiens.<\/p>\n

A player like Patrik Laine<\/a> must ritually execute the ordinary more than he did through exhibition. He\u2019s a player capable of extraordinary things but also a player who often complicates the ordinary.<\/p>\n

And what is \u201cthe ordinary?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s F3 on the forecheck, how you arrive in our zone if they get deep pucks, how you deal with the rush as the first forward back,\u201d said St. Louis. \u201cEvery team has different ways to play certain situations; do you understand how we want to play it, and can you do these ordinary things over and over that\u2019s going to allow us to kill more plays, get more pucks and now raise the percentages to be able to do extraordinary things?\u201d<\/p>\n

Oliver Kapanen and Samuel Blais did, too, and the former already made this team.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be surprised if the latter, who had five hits against the Senators, also sticks around after Sunday\u2019s cuts.<\/p>\n

Then the real fun begins, and it\u2019ll be anything but ordinary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MONTREAL \u2014 Joe Veleno took off down the wing and hit the speed burst button right as he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-190762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}