Canadiens Notebook: Anderson feeling weight of slump, Heineman ready for NHL

BROSSARD, Que. — Josh Anderson had four shots on net, one blocked, two that missed, one shootout attempt gone awry after 10 of Montreal’s 12 forwards were used before him, and he was left with that all-too-familiar — and heavy — feeling of knowing he could’ve made the difference between a win and a loss but didn’t.

Games like Wednesday night’s against the Pittsburgh Penguins have been haunting the Canadiens forward since the start of the season. 

He has one goal to his name through 29 total. It came off a shot from nearly 200 feet away and was scored into an empty net. And every second of game time that goes by without his next one going in feels like an eternity.

You almost get the sense the net feels like it’s getting smaller for him, too.

When Anderson was staring at another open one on Wednesday — this time from less than 30 feet away in the third period of the loss to the Penguins — he shot right over it. He was standing in the middle of the slot, looking at the best opportunity his team had to break a 3-3 tie, but he didn’t come close to converting. 

And Anderson didn’t get any closer in the shootout, extending the agony.

"It’s been very tough, I’m not going to lie," he said on Thursday. "I mean, usually every day you think about when you’re going to break out of that slump and start putting them in the back of the net."

It’s easy to say he should focus on something else. Perhaps on more frequently providing the physicality his six-foot-three, 224-pound body can brutely deliver.

But a big part of Anderson’s job is to score, and he knows it. 

It’s something he did at a high enough clip to earn a seven-year, $38.5-million contract in 2020, and something he did 57 more times in the three seasons that immediately followed him putting pen to paper on that contract with Montreal.

In this season, in which Anderson is being paid the highest salary of his deal ($8 million), the puck appears to be playing tricks on him. It’s torturing him.

And no one can fix the problem for Anderson.

Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis is doing all he can do to feed the player’s confidence, talking with him at practice and designing drills for all of Montreal’s slumping forwards to refine their scoring touches. However, all he can really do is empathize.

“The best way I can describe that is when you’re fighting it offensively, when your confidence is low, sometimes it’s like you’re playing the game and you’re looking through the toilet paper roll,” St. Louis said on Thursday. “When you have a lot of confidence, it’s like you have eyes behind your head. 

“So, it’s working to [widen the lens], and it doesn’t happen like that (snaps fingers). But [widening the lens] doesn’t just happen in games; you’ve got to work on that with every rep you take in practice.”

Anderson is doing that. He spent a lot of time working on his shot at practice Thursday and Friday.

But the psychological scar tissue is spreading, and it’ll only be healed when the puck starts to go in for him in games.

St. Louis knows.

“When you’re playing the game looking [through such a narrow lens] as an offensive player, as a guy who knows he can score goals, it can be suffocating a little bit, and it becomes heavy sometimes,” he said.

Anderson is dealing with it as best he can, hoping he can breathe a little easier soon.

On a lighter note…

In a hockey world made up of bland, generic, wholly uncreative nicknames, the Canadiens have a few that really stand out.

Last season, shortly after making his Canadiens debut, Arber Xhekaj revealed to us teammate Chris Wideman had aptly nicknamed him “WiFi,” because the spelling of his last name appeared like a given password for an internet connection.

It caught on with the fans, but faded quickly with Xhekaj’s teammates, who mostly call him “X” or “Arbs.”

That’s on par with most the other nicknames on the team, which are either abbreviations of their given names or extensions of them using the letter Y at the end.

“Snacks,” which was given to Samuel Montembeault, is a nice departure from the trend. But the nickname David Savard gave the Canadiens goaltender is just an observation on his ritual snacking habits and barely raises the bar for creativity.

Calling Mike Matheson “Billy” really does, however. 

We had only noticed it was the defenceman’s nickname after captain Nick Suzuki dropped it in a post-game response about the team’s power play earlier this season. 

Before we asked Matheson on Friday about the ode to Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison, we wanted to know if a few of his teammates knew the origin story of his nickname. 

Johnathan Kovacevic guessed it had come from Sean Monahan, who had one day looked at Kovacevic’s nameplate and randomly started calling him “The Kovatizer.”

“Mony’s always thinking of creative names,” said Kovacevic, “and he just delivers them so nonchalantly.”

But it wasn’t Monahan who nicknamed Matheson “Billy.”

“It was Mike Hoffman,” said Matheson after putting us through a guessing game we were never going to win. “He started calling me ‘Billy’ when we played together in Florida, but it didn’t catch on at all with anyone else on the team. He would still always call me that. And then I was here for like a month already last year and, all of a sudden, we were going for dinner, and everyone was already there, and I guess Hoff was like, ‘Billy’s on his way.’ 

“Everyone was like, ‘Who?’ 

“Then I got to dinner, and everyone was like, ‘Billy!!!”

“I’ve been “Billy” ever since.

The funniest thing about this is 19-year-old Juraj Slafkovsky has been calling Matheson “Billy” for over a year and has no idea why. 

“No clue,” he said after Wednesday’s practice. “It’s just what we call him.”

“That’s hilarious, but it’s on par,” said Kovacevic. “I don’t know if that movie made it to Slovakia.” 

Emil Heineman in?

It was a devastating blow, accidentally delivered by an official who was jumping to get out of the way of a board battle and ended up hitting Emil Heineman straight in the head with his knee.

Not that any time is a good time to suffer a concussion, but this one came after a strong end to training camp with the Canadiens that left Heineman knocking on the NHL’s door. It was suffered in the second game of the AHL season, and he missed the next 20 while Canadiens forwards were dropping out with injuries in rapid succession.

A “bummer,” was how Heinemen referred to the timing of his injury, but he’s anything but bummed now that he’s up with the Canadiens.

Tanner Pearson recently suffering a hand injury that will keep him out four-to-six weeks coincided with Heineman picking up his game in Laval after returning to play at the beginning of December. So, the young Swede was recalled earlier this week.

St. Louis wouldn’t say on Friday if Heineman would be making his NHL debut Saturday, but he did mention what he expects to eventually see from the player who came to the Canadiens as part of the Tyler Toffili trade with the Calgary Flames two seasons ago.

“I think it’s his pace, it’s his skating, it’s his physicality,” St. Louis said. “And I think when he showed that I felt like, probably in the second part of the camp, his game kind of took off a bit. To me it’s that — he’s gotta play with pace and be physical and winning battles. And he’s a good shooter, but a lot has to happen before you take a shot.”

That was a lesson that came to Heineman after a rocky beginning to training camp, when he was paired with Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield and failed to take advantage of it.

“I talked to (Canadiens director of development) Adam (Nicholas) after half the camp and just said I’m not where I want to perform out there,” Heineman said on Friday. “I just basically had to stop thinking too much and just play and be aggressive and use my strength more. That was kind of like a turning point — the last two weeks of the camp, and it really made a difference.”

There will be no hesitation this time, he insists.

“You gotta learn from that, for sure, and just go out there and play,” Heineman said. “There’s not much to think of, it’s just hockey actually, so you don’t have to think about too much — just making the play and staying in the moment.”