{"id":260014,"date":"2025-11-04T01:31:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T01:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/260014\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T01:31:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T01:31:07","slug":"matheson-canadiens-working-together-to-keep-lowlights-to-a-minimum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/260014\/","title":{"rendered":"Matheson, Canadiens working together to keep lowlights to a minimum"},"content":{"rendered":"

BROSSARD, Que.\u2014 It\u2019s been missing from Mike Matheson<\/a>\u2019s game so far this season, and if he and the Montreal Canadiens<\/a> keep it up, it\u2019ll remain that way.<\/p>\n

Yes, we\u2019re referring to the egregious turnover.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Matheson knows he committed too many of them last season.<\/p>\n

But he also knows hockey\u2019s a team sport, and that the Canadiens spent most of last season figuring out how to play it the way they\u2019ve been playing it so far this season.<\/p>\n

So far this season, the Canadiens, who are 9-3-0, have really been playing like a team. They\u2019ve been connected in all three zones, making them much more predictable to each other. And that predictability has played a huge hand in Matheson nailing his risk-reward calculation as precisely as possible through 12 games, over which he\u2019s arguably been Montreal\u2019s most effective player.<\/p>\n

The 31-year-old deserves credit, too. He\u2019s been as on top of his game as he\u2019d have hoped going into the season.<\/p>\n

But Matheson knows he\u2019d have to be calculating his risk a lot more if his teammates weren\u2019t as well-positioned as they have been all over the ice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that definitely helps anybody,\u201d Matheson said in an interview with Sportsnet Monday. \u201cThe better the team is playing, the more connected it is, the easier it is, especially as a defenceman. There\u2019s way less time being spent having to choose between the safer of two options, so I think there\u2019s a lot of value in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the connectivity of Montreal\u2019s players is \u201cnight and day compared to last season,\u201d making the jobs he and Matheson must do that much easier.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They were painfully hard at the start of last October when the Canadiens were completely disconnected and therefore completely unpredictable to each other.<\/p>\n

Chaos ensued in the defensive zone, and Matheson would be the first to admit he extended it at times by forcing certain plays while overthinking others.<\/p>\n

But when he\u2019s on the ice now, the puck is barely getting deep enough into the defensive zone for chaos to affect his process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A lot of the time, it\u2019s not getting into the defensive zone at all, and that\u2019s because Matheson ranks first in the NHL in neutral-zone denials, according to SportLogiq.<\/p>\n

He also ranks eighth among all players in denying controlled zone entries.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that says a lot about his feet, his quickness, and his lateral movement,\u201d said Cole Caufield.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Matheson feels it says a lot about the way the Canadiens are playing, and that it says just as much about the support Noah Dobson has given him as his defence partner.<\/p>\n

\u201cI credit a lot of it to him,\u201d said Matheson. \u201cI think he\u2019s a really easy player to play with. I just feel like he\u2019s always so in control of what he\u2019s doing, and that makes him a really easy player to read off. He makes a lot of great plays with the puck, and then he\u2019s always in the right spot without the puck where I can rely on him.\u201d<\/p>\n

It takes the thinking out of the equation, which only helps with the risk-reward calculation.<\/p>\n

Matheson struggled with that from time to time last season. Much more so than he wanted to, but also much less so than he was given credit for on social media, where the one or two errors he\u2019d make per game were seemingly cancelling out all the good he was doing.<\/p>\n

There was a lot of good, with Matheson accepting to move from the first power-play unit to the first penalty-killing unit and from offensive defenceman to top shutdown defenceman just one season removed from producing 62 points. He played the most minutes, he played the hardest minutes in the hardest matchups, and he played them as well as he possibly could to help the Canadiens to an unexpected playoff berth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But with the mistakes often glaring and sometimes costly, the social media discourse around his game was frustratingly myopic.<\/p>\n

Even if Matheson tried to avoid it, he couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

But the player was still able to keep that discourse in perspective.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m definitely the hardest person on me in the entire world,\u201d the Pointe-Claire, Que., native said. \u201cAt the same time, I think there\u2019s opinions out there where people have just sort of made up their mind about me and those opinions became trendy. Opinions are very trendy at times in this market, where someone will say one thing and it snowballs where, all of a sudden, it\u2019s the go-to thought. And then it takes a long time for that to be reversed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are definitely times where I\u2019m mad at myself for the way I played, just as anybody else would be. But the narrative about me has gone on longer than my actual game has warranted at times.\u201d<\/p>\n

The narrative that Matheson costs the Canadiens more than he gives them has been completely silenced for now, even if nothing about his game is particularly different.<\/p>\n

He averaged a team-leading 25:05 last season and is averaging a team-leading 24:53 this season. He took on the hardest assignments at five-on-five, started 90 per cent of his shifts outside the offensive zone, played the majority of every two-minute penalty kill, and he continues to do all of that while producing and serving as one of the biggest factors in the Canadiens winning more games than they lose.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s changed considerably is how the team is playing around Matheson.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re connected to the point where even if the other team makes a good read and cuts off a play we\u2019re trying to make, we\u2019re all in the right spots to recover,\u201d said Hutson. \u201cI think everyone\u2019s really fallen into the structure really good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experience and maturity are factors in that.<\/p>\n

Continuity, according to Matheson, might be the most relevant factor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe continuity (in personnel) has helped a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the continuity of the coaching staff has really helped a lot, too. For myself, this is the longest I\u2019ve ever been with one coaching staff. This is my fourth year with this coaching staff and, before that, I\u2019d never been more than two years with any coaching staff. It makes a big difference. The message has been consistent. We\u2019ve changed little things as we\u2019ve gone along, but the message has been streamlined and similar over the last few years, which helps a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nothing helps more than the players receiving the message and properly applying it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey see what we\u2019re doing, and see the successful results the process has produced,\u201d said Matheson. \u201cSurpassing expectations by making the playoffs last year created total buy-in from every single player, and that\u2019s ultimately what makes a team good. It\u2019s not necessarily a 1-2-2 that\u2019s going to beat a 1-3-1 every single time, or a man-up forecheck that\u2019s going to be beat this or that scheme; it\u2019s really about every player being so bought into a scheme and executing it at a very high level consistently, and I feel like we really have that buy-in.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s enabling the individuals to shine, Matheson included.<\/p>\n

His three goals, four assists and plus-7 rating tell part of that story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Having only 12 giveways, with none of them being particularly memorable, tells another.<\/p>\n

Not that Matheson expects to be perfect, and not that anyone should expect him to be.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a game of mistakes, and pretty much every shift there\u2019s some kind of mistake that happens, so you can\u2019t get caught up in each one of them, even if some people watching do,\u201d Matheson said. \u201cIt\u2019s so funny how, oftentimes, to understand what happened on a certain play, what do you have to do? You have to go back and look at the replay. You have the snap-of-a-finger amount of time to figure out what to do and execute it under pressure, though. Everyone can have that reaction watching a replay and saying, \u2018Oh, what was he thinking?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Matheson doesn\u2019t have time for dwelling on mistakes, or the past.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m personally focused on each game at a time,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not worried about what I did in the last game, or worried about what I did in games last year. I\u2019m just thinking about what my matchup is going to be for the next game, a couple of things I\u2019d like to continue to implement in my game that I\u2019ve been working on, a couple of things to continue to get better at and tighten up, and just bring all that into the next one.\u201d<\/p>\n

That process is working well for Matheson, and for the Canadiens, and they\u2019re sticking to it to keep the lowlights to a minimum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BROSSARD, Que.\u2014 It\u2019s been missing from Mike Matheson\u2019s game so far this season, and if he and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-260014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260014","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=260014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}