Canadiens' loss to Capitals a fitting end to a miserable 2022

Being undone by Erik Gustafsson feels like as good a way as any to wind down 2022 for the Montreal Canadiens.

He was the defenceman who couldn’t crack Montreal’s lineup for roughly half the games he was eligible to play from the time he was acquired in April 2021 to the time the Canadiens wrapped their run to the Stanley Cup Final that year. On Saturday, Gustfasson was the one extending a personal point streak to seven games to help the Washington Capitals plunder his former team further into its year-ending tailspin.

The Canadiens dropping their fifth consecutive game felt imminent from the second Gustafsson notched his second point of the afternoon by setting Nic Dowd up for a goal that put Washington up 3-1 with more than 30 minutes remaining.

In reality, though, another loss felt probable 32 seconds into the game, when Josh Anderson carelessly gave away the puck in his own end and Gustfasson skated uncontested through the slot and opened the scoring to make it a league-leading fourth time the Canadiens had given up a goal in the opening minute of a game this season.

Gustafsson!

Not Alex Ovechkin, who’s chasing down Wayne Gretzky to become the most productive goal scorer in NHL history, but Gustaffson!

We know, the 30-year-old who hadn’t scored a goal through his first 31 games of the season has suddenly produced six goals and six assists and been one of the hottest players in the NHL over his last seven games.

But still.

Oh, and hey, Ovechkin got in on the party, too—scoring Goals 24, 25 and 26 on his season for the 30th hat trick of his career after the Capitals had already given themselves enough cushion to rest comfortably heading out to party for New Year’s Eve.

But we digress…

This was a 9-2 loss for the Canadiens to Gustafsson, former Canadiens goaltender Charlie Lindgren, Ovechkin and the Capitals with their mothers taking in the game from the stands. It was a 9-2 loss to follow a 7-2 loss to the Florida Panthers on Thursday. It was the team’s 11th loss of this 15-game month, it was its 11th consecutive game failing to score more than two goals, and it was a fitting end to arguably the worst calendar year in the franchise’s 113-year history.

It would unquestionably be the worst if not for a large part of it being played under the context of a stated rebuild, during the first phase of which development would be prioritized over wins.

Still, the Canadiens looking much more like Dominique Ducharme’s team than Martin St. Louis’ entering 2023 is an unwelcome development after so much progress had been made under the new coach through the back half of last season and the opening two months of this one.

Confidence is more than shaken for this group. Right now, it appears almost completely shattered.

Perhaps Cole Caufield redeemed some of his by scoring his 20 and 21^st goals of the season after going four games without seeing the puck cross the goal line off his stick. Perhaps Nick Suzuki bought some back setting up Caufield’s first on the power play to earn his first point in six games.

As Caufield told reporters in Washington afterward, “We want to be the guys that the team looks to produce offence and get us going,” and it had to have felt good for them to have been doing that once again and for the first time in too long.

And maybe the rest of the Canadiens took something from how they all played for the 30-minute stretch that came directly after giving up the first two goals in the first 4:32 of Saturday’s game.

But the way they followed that up by tripping all over themselves in coverage, before essentially dropping their guard in what became a hopeless cause after 40 minutes expired, was revealing of how far they have to come just to get back to where they were at the beginning of December. That wasn’t exactly premium position to begin with, unless we’re talking about still being among the 16 teams who will compete in the 2023 draft lottery.

Few Canadiens fans would complain about their odds significantly increasing in that race over the past four weeks, but the process seemed a lot healthier back before this slide.

It’s going to be difficult to remedy without Kaiden Guhle, Montreal’s young-gun defenceman who missed Saturday’s game with a lower-body injury and is heading back up north to undergo further testing instead of traveling with his teammates to Nashville.

It was already hard without Mike Matheson, David Savard, Sean Monahan, and without Brendan Gallagher, who missed a month with a lower-body injury before only returning on Thursday against Florida.

The feisty winger, who appeared to reinjure himself in the first period of Saturday’s game before returning in the second period, is taking an optimist’s view on the process ahead.

“You’re never as good as you think you are when you’re winning hockey games and you’re never as bad as you think you are when you’re losing games,” Gallagher told reporters. “There’s not a ton of areas that we need to fix to get back to where we were a couple of months ago, but there are areas and there are some corrections that we have to make. As a team, we have to make sure we separate the emotions from the game, from the task at hand, and handle it so this doesn’t become another month of this.

“We’re turning the calendar here. Hopefully we’re able to correct it.”

Hopefully the Canadiens are able to distance themselves significantly from 2022, because it was about as bad throughout for them as Saturday’s loss was.