Even with 25 seconds left in a game they were trailing 7-4, the Montreal Canadiens continued to press, with Jake Evans finding Jayden Struble, who set up Joshua Roy with a Grade-A scoring chance New York Rangers goaltender Jonathan Quick snuffed out.
It was Montreal’s 10th high-danger attempt in the game, their 28th scoring chance, and that typically is enough to finish the night in the win column.
Unless you give up the quality of chances the Canadiens surrendered over the final 30 minutes of play.
Their young defencemen were on the wrong side of the best ones, reminding all of us that, even with as far as they’ve come in so little time, they’re still in need of plenty of seasoning.
And that’s normal. It’s the hardest position to play outside of the net, the one that requires the most repetition to establish consistency, and that’s something that has to be kept in perspective while young forwards on the Canadiens are flourishing at an astounding rate.
The Canadiens as a whole, including their young defencemen, were nearly letter-perfect through the first half of Thursday’s game, earning a lead on a first-period goal Evans scored and shutting down all second-chance opportunities in front of goaltender Samuel Montembeault.
But from the second the Canadiens bent, they appeared ready to break, and that’s when the Rangers scored four unanswered goals in just over four minutes of play.
“First goal is a defensive error, the other goal is a faceoff, the other goal is a power play, the other on a delayed penalty,” Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis said to reporters at Madison Square Garden. “Four goals in four minutes hurt. Before those four goals, we were controlling the game. We took it back towards the end of the second but that fifth goal hurt.”
It was scored with four veteran players on the ice for the Canadiens.
Just like Chris Kreider’s power-play marker before it, which made it 4-1 Rangers.
But the next two New York managed came against two defencemen — Arber Xhekaj and Johnathan Kovacevic — who started last season with four games of NHL experience between them. And that was a period after Kaiden Guhle, who had zero games under his belt before last October, was victimized on the goal Will Cuylle scored to make it 2-1 Rangers.
It was the faceoff play St. Louis was referring to, on which Guhle marked his man but failed to get proper positioning on him and failed to tie up his stick.
You see mistakes like these — Xhekaj trying to hold his own blue line while there wasn’t enough back pressure to support that decision on Kreider’s hat-trick goal, or Kovacevic allowing Kappo Kakko to burn him to the inside of the slot — and know they’re valuable lessons for young defencemen to learn.
Jayden Struble, who’s just 36 games into his NHL career, was served some last Sunday and already applied some of what he learned in rebound performances against the Anaheim Ducks and Rangers.
Xhekaj, Kovacevic and Guhle will bounce back in turn.
But there will be more nights like these for all of them, and the Canadiens are going to have to live with that through the end of this season.
They’ll probably have to live through that for a fair portion of the next one, too, because you really only start to see even the most talented defencemen hit their stride with more than 250 games under their belts.
Sure, the Canadiens would love to see their young defencemen develop at the same rate as Cole Caufield, Nick Suzuki and Juraj Slafkovsky.
All three of those players have recently provided reason to believe this rebuild, which is already past its infancy stage, is accelerating with great velocity. With an assist on this night, Suzuki extended his point streak to nine games, while Slafkovsky had a goal and an assist to become the first teenager in franchise history to record at least a point in a seventh consecutive game and the 23-year-old Caufield had two goals and an assist to bring his season totals up to 19 goals and 45 points in 54 games, and that was all encouraging.
But the Canadiens know defencemen take a little more time to fully bake, and nights like this one — painful as they may be — should only help that process.
Not to suggest the young blueliners on the Canadiens were fully responsible for the team allowing another touchdown after giving up one to the St. Louis Blues on Sunday. Everyone let their guard down during that four-minute frenzy, including Montembeault, who wasn’t to blame but also wasn’t his best self throughout the night.
It’s just that these young defencemen are still learning how to consistently manage the ebb and flow of the game and how to consistently apply the details that limit the type of breakdowns they had against the Rangers.
With time, there will be less and less of them.
And the experience gained over these final 28 games will only help bring these players along faster.
COMMENTS
When submitting content, please abide by our submission guidelines, and avoid posting profanity, personal attacks or harassment. Should you violate our submissions guidelines, we reserve the right to remove your comments and block your account. Sportsnet reserves the right to close a story’s comment section at any time.