Canadiens need resiliency to flip late-season skid, find footing in wild-card race

RALEIGH, N.C. — “We were just a step behind,” said Kaiden Guhle about his Montreal Canadiens, who lost their fifth game in a row and finally lost a step in the Eastern Conference wild-card race.

Guhle had been watching the Canadiens fight to put themselves in a playoff position while he healed up from the lacerated quadricep that took him out of action on Jan. 28. He said their resiliency, in clawing back points in games they fell behind in of late, was what stood out most to him about their success in his absence.

Now the Canadiens must find the resiliency to re-establish what’s given them the majority of their wins this season.

“Our forecheck is our DNA,” Guhle said. “When we’re suffocating teams, I feel like we have the best forecheck in the league, and we have some really good skaters, some big bodies that get in there and make it really hard for their D to make clean plays, and I think that’s something that we’re struggling to get consistency with right now.”

The Canadiens couldn’t even get to it in Friday’s 4-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes.

Through the first 40 minutes of play, they were barely able to find their way to the offensive zone — registering just seven one-and-done shots on Hurricanes goaltender Frederik Andersen when they did — and that was because they failed regularly to execute their strategy for getting out of their own zone.

The Canadiens needed their defencemen to pass or flip pucks past the first wave of pressure the Hurricanes are known to bring, but, as Guhle mentioned, they were just a step behind in doing that.

The forwards were a step ahead, leading coach Martin St. Louis to say afterwards, “To beat pressure, you’ve got to try to be in between checks, you’ve got to push them back and sometimes come back to the puck.”

“We could’ve done a better job of that,” St. Louis added.

Had the Canadiens had the energy after losing 6-4 in Philadelphia on Thursday, and had they had the focus and execution that’s been lacking through most of their last five games, perhaps they might have.

But that’s all behind them now, and what lies ahead of them is a 10-game opportunity they somehow haven’t completely squandered with this ill-timed skid.

“You can’t dwell on it,” said Canadiens leading goal scorer Cole Caufield, who finished Friday’s game without a single shot attempt. “To say we’d be in this position at the start of the year, we’d grab that and do whatever it takes to be in this position. We can’t take it for granted. Every game matters. Every game counts. The next one is the most important.”

Without corrections from this one, the Canadiens can’t win it.

Josh Anderson put them up 1-0 on their first shot of the game, in the 23^rd second of play.

But their lead lasted just 18 seconds, with Jackson Blake responding immediately for the Hurricanes.

If that didn’t speak to the fragility of Montreal’s confidence, Mike Matheson cornering himself with the puck in his own zone before giving it away and forcing partner Lane Hutson to take a penalty certainly did.

Still, Taylor Hall’s goal on the ensuing power play came with 26:14 remaining — with plenty of time for the Canadiens to get themselves back into the game.

Instead, they took themselves further out of it less than three minutes later, when Alex Carrier forced a shot that was easily blocked and turned up ice before Arber Xhekaj made the inexplicable decision to go for a big hit that took him out of the play and turned an already-threatening situation into a goal against.

“I think it’s a clean three-on-two,” said St. Louis, “and we didn’t play it like that.”

Xhekaj turned a clean three-on-two into a clean two-on-one for Hurricanes leading scorers Sebastian Aho and Seth Jarvis and put the Canadiens further behind than they already appeared.

It’s a spot they’ve become too familiar with this late into the season. To constantly be having to rely on their noted resiliency within the game has become too taxing.

Now the Canadiens are going to have to find some of it between the games to put an end to that pattern. They’re making many of the mistakes they made early in the season — the ones they successfully erased through the middle portion — and if they don’t figure out how to stop making them, they won’t be able to get back to the best element of their game.

“It seems like our timing might be a little bit off right now (on the forecheck),” said Guhle. “It’s just something that we’re going to find.”

He added he wasn’t “worried at all about it,” but if the Canadiens don’t fix it immediately, they’ll fall much further than a step behind and have no one to blame for it but themselves.