Canadiens must raise expectations to achieve desired growth

LAVAL-SUR-LE-LAC, Que. — It’s a brief, informal conversation with Cole Caufield that yields the one thing you hope to hear from a member of a team aiming to transition from bottom-dweller to playoff contender.

“We want to win every game,” the young Montreal Canadiens sniper says from the team’s annual golf tournament, and it’s something that needs to be said.

At the very least, Caufield’s words stand out on a day where most the ones uttered shape clichés and platitudes about growth and all the jazz typically played by owners, managers and coaches of a team that’s just now emerging from the infancy stage of a rebuild.

Not that you’d want the Canadiens to be delusional about where they stand coming off a 28^th-place finish in the 32-team NHL in 2023, but you would hope they’d at least have bigger ambitions than just showing up, playing the games and hoping the process leads to progress in 2024.

It’s reasonable to manage expectations. Prudent even, given the inexperience of the group and the strength — or weakness — of it in relation to the other teams in what might be considered the toughest division in hockey.

But the bar still has to be elevated from where it was set last September, when the Canadiens were standing around the plush greens of one of Quebec’s most prestigious golf clubs, preparing to cautiously take their first baby steps back to prominence.

No one on the outside expects giant leaps this winter, nor should they. The Canadiens are young — not just individually, but also as a team — and they’re still lacking the type of depth and talent that appears to be spilling over the sides of the boats their Atlantic Division foes are steering.

But the Canadiens themselves have to at least be feeling like they’re using the progress they experienced last season as a trampoline to a better place. In golf terms, they have to at least be aiming for the pin rather than just hoping to hit it close to the green.

In that respect, we admired what Caufield said.

Just like we enjoyed hearing newly minted assistant captain Mike Matheson say, “At a certain point, you just have to make a decision that we’re here, we’ve arrived, and the only way you do that is to just push every single day to get better and make sure that you show up every single day expecting to win, and not just throwing in the towel saying, ‘Oh, we’re just going to develop today.’”

For the fans intending on paying skyrocketing ticket prices to attend Canadiens games, that should be reassuring. At least a little more so than hearing executive vice-president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton say, “I know that everybody would like us to say the P-word,” and then refusing to say the P-word.

Not that Gorton should be so bold as to predict the Canadiens are going to make the playoffs because, frankly, a statement like that would be far more based in delusion than reality. It’s just that if he wants them to achieve their goal of, as he put it, “continuing to get better every day,” the emphasis on winning has to be considerably stronger than it was for all of last season, when results were understandably secondary to development.

At least Canadiens coach (or chief development officer, as he could be known) Martin St. Louis acknowledges it.

“I’ll tell you right now, we’re coming in and we want to do as well as we can do,” St. Louis said. “But we’ve gotta stick with the process that we put in place. We understand that our culture is very important to us, and responsibilities is part of our culture. I think the responsibilities are going to be just a bit bigger this year, and I think the guys are ready for that. I think we have a lot of youth, but we have some youth that has experience now. So we’re going to try to elevate our game, and it comes with understanding that we have to elevate the responsibilities a little bit, and the accountability.”

And the expectations.

St. Louis should have higher ones this season after spending the last one building an identity for the Canadiens to adhere to.

They might not be so high that he’ll completely remove the white gloves he wore throughout games last season, but he should at least be willing to put a bit of dirt on them this time around in order to hold players to the standards they already established.

Many of them took great strides in environment that permitted them to make glaring mistakes and learn from them on the fly, but they have to be able to continue pushing forward in a more demanding environment this season.

“We don’t want to burden them with it’s a zero-sum game of you either accomplish this or it’s a failure,” said Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes.

But he also made it clear he doesn’t want his players thinking the stakes haven’t risen.

“I can’t give you a concrete definition of how expectations have changed, but I said at the end of last season we’re not coming in thinking it’s a given we won’t make the playoffs,” Hughes said in French.

“At the end of the day, this is still a game of wins and losses, and we want that,” he added in English.

The Canadiens still managed 31 wins and points in six more games with the most injury-depleted lineup in the league last season, and they should be able to do better with nearly a complete roster of players entering next week’s training camp at full health.

Experience is a factor, too, and while the Canadiens are still loaded with young players, those young players — like Kaiden Guhle, Arber Xhekaj, Jordan Harris, Juraj Slafkovsky, and even Rafael Harvey-Pinard — gained valuable experience by being forced into roles they’d have not necessarily filled last year had it not been for the multitude of injuries the team suffered.

That they were able to enter the NHL and go through the growing pains together should propel them further.

“It brings us really close to each other,” said Xhekaj, “and the older guys did a great job of showing us the right path.”

One of them, Matheson, who called it “an honour” and “a dream come true” to be named to the leadership group of the team he grew up cheering for in the city he was born and raised, will have to build on a career year to help carry the Canadiens deeper down that right path.

The 29-year-old will also need fellow 1994-born Josh Anderson and 31-year-old Brendan Gallagher to bring their respective games up to the level.

And some of the more experienced — but still young — players, like Kirby Dach, captain Nick Suzuki and Caufield, will have to keep upping the ante.

Alex Newhook, who was acquired in a summer trade with the Colorado Avalanche, will need to break out offensively in what will be Games 160 through 241 of his NHL career, if he can remain healthy.

And even if all that happens, and goaltender Samuel Montembeault builds on a strong season and a gold-medal performance with Team Canada at last spring’s world championship, it probably still won’t be enough to carry the Canadiens to the playoffs.

But if they really want to experience the growth Gorton, Hughes, St. Louis and all the players are hoping for, they have to be pushing for them from the start.

“We want to be in the winning column this year,” said Anderson. “You have to (raise expectations). At the end of the day, it’s been two long years of not being there and it definitely sucks finishing early and seeing hockey still on TV and you’re not playing. So I’m sure everybody in that locker room wants to have a successful year and make a run.”