{"id":455465,"date":"2026-02-05T12:51:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T12:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/455465\/"},"modified":"2026-02-05T12:51:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T12:51:08","slug":"canadiens-chase-to-olympic-break-proves-readiness-for-playoff-push","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/455465\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadiens’ chase to Olympic break proves readiness for playoff push"},"content":{"rendered":"

WINNIPEG \u2014This game turned on a play Juraj Slafkovsky started and Oliver Kapanen<\/a> finished.<\/p>\n

The Montreal Canadiens<\/a> never looked back after that goal came in the 17th\u00a0minute of Wednesday\u2019s game against the Winnipeg Jets. It proved to be the first of five unanswered they scored in their 5-1 win at Canada Life Centre.<\/p>\n

If not for Samuel Montembeault<\/a> stopping 12 of the first 13 shots he faced \u2014 standing on his head for most of them \u2014 all we\u2019d be doing is reflecting on one of the worst periods the Canadiens had played all season.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They were disorganized and disconnected, leaving Montembeault to return the favour they\u2019ve done him in most the games in which he\u2019s appeared out of sorts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it was my best game,\u201d the 29-year-old said after not allowing more than one goal for only the second time in 23 appearances. \u201cI felt great physically before it started.\u201d<\/p>\n

Montembeault was on Cloud 9 afterwards, with 36 saves banked and confidence restored, and that was a nice story on its own, even if it isn\u2019t the focal one heading into the Olympic break.<\/p>\n

Big picture: This was Montreal\u2019s fifth win in their last eight games, with the other four coming against the elite of the elite (Minnesota, Vegas, Colorado and Buffalo). It\u2019s quite a departure from what they did last year at this time.<\/p>\n

Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis wanted them to chase to the break for the 4 Nations Face-Off, but they sputtered and choked, losing seven of their last eight games and digging themselves a hole almost too deep to climb out of.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019re not the same team,\u201d said St. Louis after the win over the Jets. \u201cWe might have a lot of the same players, but we have more experience. I think that playoff round (against the Washington Capitals) helped us mature. I think we carried that into the season and we were able to mature and able to navigate the lows we had this year just because of what we went through last year, and we understood what happened last year before the break and we did not want to repeat that. So, I felt we had the right intentions to give ourselves the best chance to not repeat that. And it\u2019s not one guy, it\u2019s not two guys. You need everyone, and I felt we had that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite pockets of play that weren\u2019t great but never quite as bad as what we saw in Wednesday\u2019s first period, the Canadiens found exactly that over this sequence of games.<\/p>\n

A lot of it was driven by guys going to the Olympics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On this night it started with Slafkovsky, who notched his 45th\u00a0point of the season by peeling the puck off the boards, shuffling his feet to create space for himself near the point and leaning on his poise to get the play over to Noah Dobson.<\/p>\n

It was more of the stuff the 21-year-old has delivered all season, which should make him that much more dangerous than he was as MVP of the last Olympics for bronze-medalist Slovakia.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he\u2019s made another big jump this year,\u201d said St. Louis prior to Wednesday\u2019s game. \u201cYou can see this year his confidence level, his touches, have improved tremendously\u2026 He\u2019s played some really good hockey for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

So has Kapanen, who once again put himself in the right place at the right time to score that crucial first goal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was his 18th\u00a0of the season, tying him with Beckett Sennecke for the most among NHL rookies.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s smart, he\u2019s in the good spots, he can read off playing with me and (Ivan Demidov),\u201d said Slafkovsky Wednesday morning. \u201cHe\u2019s in the good spots most of the time during the games.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where Finland will need Kapanen to be at the Winter Olympics in Milan.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just excited to get over there, get going with the guys in a few days and get going on the dream come true,\u201d the London, Ont., native said after getting his second-lightest assignment all season.<\/p>\n

Call playing only 16:56 against the Jets a gift from St. Louis, who knows how much energy Suzuki\u2019s expended to push the Canadiens to the sixth-best record in the NHL through 57 games and how much energy he\u2019ll need to help Canada in their bid for gold.<\/p>\n

Suzuki may have been held off the scoresheet in the game against the Jets, but the Canadiens went 5-1-2 over their last eight with him posting 11 points and a plus-7 rating to bring him to 65 points and plus-25 on the season.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has the ability to elevate his game when we need it most, and he\u2019s taken over games for sure,\u201d said Brendan Gallagher<\/a> Wednesday morning. \u201cHe\u2019s in a good spot heading to the Olympics.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Gallagher, Phillip Danault and Josh Anderson<\/a> \u2014 the veteran triumvirate of the Canadiens \u2014 they all scored against the Jets to extend an excellent run of play that\u2019s made them an unbreakable line moving forward.<\/p>\n

The rest will likely benefit them most among all the other Canadiens not going to the Olympics, with all three of them being in their 30’s on a team full of 20-somethings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 31-year-old Mike Matheson<\/a>, who played 24:50 against the Jets \u2014 which is his team-leading average time-on-ice this season \u2014 will reap the rewards, too.<\/p>\n

St. Louis wants him, and everyone else to do that before practice resumes Feb. 17.<\/p>\n

\u201cTake a break, disconnect a little bit from the grind, be safe, have fun, but be hungry for what\u2019s next,\u201d was the message the coach imparted on his players.<\/p>\n

Most of them will heed that advice and head to their tropical destination of choice.<\/p>\n

But Lane Hutson, who scored as nice of a goal as you\u2019ll see a defenceman score to get to 10 goals and 58 points on his season, isn\u2019t like most of them.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s going to Boston to take in the rest of the Beanpot, and then he\u2019s shuffling home to Chicago, where he will undoubtedly be on the ice more often than just about any other player in the league not attending the Olympics.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t worry, that\u2019s Hutson just doing what he wants to do most.<\/p>\n

If we\u2019re to take anything from the way he and the Canadiens played in the lead-up to this juncture of their season, it’s that they\u2019ll be ready for the real fun when hockey resumes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WINNIPEG \u2014This game turned on a play Juraj Slafkovsky started and Oliver Kapanen finished. The Montreal Canadiens never…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":455466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-455465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455465","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=455465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/455466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}