Canadiens Notebook: Pitlick's reversal, Dach's maturation, Edmundson's challenge

BROSSARD, Que.— Rem Pitlick being waived at 2:00 p.m. on Monday, less than a year after joining the Canadiens via waivers and producing nine goals and 26 points in 46 games to earn himself a two-year, $2.2-million contract, wasn’t entirely unforeseeable.

He didn’t just suddenly become the biggest casualty of the crowded roster in Montreal, he’s been it since the beginning of the season—scratched from five of the team’s 12 games thus far, played almost exclusively in a fourth-line role and for close to five minutes less per game than he averaged last season.

It’s just that now it’s likely leading Pitlick to a place he—and most Canadiens observers—didn’t envision him ending up in after last year’s strong campaign and a good training camp.

The decision to send Pitlick to Laval, should he clear waivers, isn’t an easy one for the Canadiens to make in order to cut their roster down to 23 players. But it’s an easier one than sending one of veterans Mike Hoffman, Jonathan Drouin or Evgenii Dadonov down at this juncture.

The thing is, if the Canadiens were just looking to make the easiest decision, any of their rookies who aren’t waiver-eligible could’ve been taking Pitlick’s place with the Rocket.

But the Canadiens are running this based on merit, their rookies don’t deserve a demotion, and Pitlick’s performance has left too much to be desired to start the season.

Even with limited opportunity, he’s an offensive player who’s yet to produce a point in seven games, and the decisions he’s been making in offensive situations have been indicative of a player whose confidence is waning.

Right now, Pitlick has more minor penalties to his name than he does shot attempts from the high-danger area.

At $1.1 million on the cap both this year and next, the 25-year-old is likely to pass through waivers and end up in Laval.

But we’re not bringing all this up to denigrate Pitlick.

He has shown he can be a much more effective player, even in a far more limited role—he produced six goals and 11 points averaging close to three minutes less through 20 games with the Minnesota Wild last season than he’s averaging this season in Montreal—and a little stint in the minors could help him regain some of his swagger.

It has to.

“We’ve seen a lot of growth in the last 10 months, a year, and unfortunately for him this happens,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis on Monday. “But I know he’s going to the stay the course, and I think has the potential to be a really good player in this league. It’s just an unfortunate situation for him today, but it’s part of a career. I look back at mine today, at 25 I was trying to get a jersey. So sometimes you’ve just gotta stay the course, and I know Rem will do that.”

There will be more opportunities for Pitlick in Montreal if he does.

Meanwhile, the competition narrows for the players who escaped Pitlick’s fate on Monday but might not escape for that much longer.

Drouin and Hoffman have produced just two points each—despite ample power-play opportunity and offensive-zone starts—and will have a hard time justifying their spots in the lineup if they don’t begin to change that.

Dadonov is eligible to come off the injured-reserve list on Tuesday and has to start looking much more like the player who scored 20 goals and had 43 points with Vegas last season instead of the one who has zeroes through eight games this season. He was scratched before he got sick, and he could find himself in Pitlick’s situation in a hurry if Mike Matheson continues to progress as quickly as he appears to be progressing in his rehab from an abdominal strain and forces the Canadiens to once again reduce the roster size.

Speaking of Matheson, who was supposed to miss eight weeks with this injury but looks like he might only make it six, it wasn’t at all peculiar to see him once again skating ahead of practice.

What was somewhat peculiar was that he was doing so alongside director of hockey development Adam Nicholas and development staffer Scott Pellerin instead of being accompanied by at least one of the Canadiens’ various trainers. That’s not very common practice for players who are rehabbing injuries.

Matheson pushed hard, and then so did Nicholas and Pellerin when Canadiens practice got underway 30 minutes later.

Nicholas has been a fixture at Canadiens practices in Brossard and Montreal this season and, on Monday, it was interesting to see the role Pellerin took on as the team practiced for an hour and 10 minutes.

He was holding an iPad, recording a lot of the drills from ice level.

Now, it’s pretty common for teams to tape their practices, but it’s not so common for one of the development coaches to be doing it from the ice.

The benefits are obvious, though.

“Good thing for the coaching staff to have,” said Canadiens forward Jake Evans, and that’s a thought St. Louis later echoed.

Evans also said he’s benefited from it, with Nicholas or Pellerin showing him a couple of sequences from training camp where he made certain moves that led to good chances or goals. He said that bolstered his confidence to try those things in games.

Nicholas and Pellerin will approach the players with certain things they see to reinforce good habits and boost confidence.

But, more than anything, they want the videos to serve as tools the players can access and discuss with them any time they like.

One player who likes that process has 10 points in his first 12 games as a Canadien.

“We have every tool we could ever ask for here,” said Kirby Dach, “and those are key tools to use in order to get better.”

“For me, I just watch more technical stuff with Scott Pellerin and Adam Nicholas, working on time and space and finding ways to shoot more pucks,” Dach continued. “Those are the areas I look at video to understand a bit more.”

It could be brought to Dach, but he usually likes to go seek it out.

“They let you know they have it, but as a player, it’s your own responsibility to take your own development into your own hands and help yourself out,” Dach said.

This is a quote from a player who’s clearly maturing before our eyes.

It’s Dach’s fourth year in the NHL, and he appears to be embracing this mentality a lot more now than he did after he was drafted third overall by the Chicago Blackhawks in 2019.

You want every player, no matter their age, to take the same approach as the 21-year-old when it comes to their development and using all the tools that are at their disposal.

But the Canadiens aren’t forcing it, nor is St. Louis taking stock of who’s spending time analyzing their own practice footage.

“I know a lot of guys watch their shifts in games. I don’t know if we’re at a point where they’re going to watch all their reps in practice,” he said. “I don’t think we’re there. I think sometimes it could be too much.”

But Nicholas, Pellerin and the development staff are providing a resource there’s been too little of in this organization for a long time, and the stuff we saw on Monday is just a small sample of that.

When we asked Dach if he felt he was getting enough recognition for his strong play prior to joining Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield and producing a goal and six assists over his last four games, he laughed and retorted: “From who?”

It was his way of saying he was aware of how certain people were interpreting his game as he only produced a goal and two assists through his first eight of the season, but the laugh suggested he was unbothered by whatever negative reaction there was outside of the Canadiens.

Dach said he felt he was playing well, generating chances for himself and his linemates, building chemistry with his new teammates all while adjusting to a new city, a new coach, a new team and parts moving all around him, and was happy the Canadiens’ coaches and his teammates felt the same.

His underlying numbers supported what they were all seeing.

“I’ve felt good in my game since the start of the year,” Dach said. “There’s been a few games where I’d like to go back and fix things, but that’s the game of hockey. You move on and focus on the next one, and that’s what’s great about this group is we all seem to be doing that.”

The 6-foot-5, 221-pound defenceman looked out of sorts in Saturday’s 6-4 loss to the Vegas Golden Knights and admitted on Monday that he felt out of sorts, too.

Consider how difficult it must be to miss all of training camp, miss the first 10 games of the season and then be expected to jump right into the action at full speed as a stabilizing force on one of the NHL’s least experienced blue lines.

Edmundson, who’s 29 years old, was strong in a 3-2 overtime loss to his hometown Winnipeg Jets last Thursday but made some uncharacteristically poor decisions in Saturday’s game that left him fuming at himself.

“It’s tough, especially coming back to the Bell Centre,” he explained on Monday. “You get all the emotion from the crowd and you’re almost too excited and you end up wanting to overdo everything. You have to sit back, relax and let the game come to you.

“After a couple of games, I’ll be good to go. You just forget how fast this league really is. Every year it gets faster and faster, so you gotta be on your A-game every night.”

He didn’t get the nickname “Steady Eddy” because it’s a good play on words with his last name.

Edmundson has been one of the most consistent players on this team since signing a four-year, $14-million contract in 2020.

That is, of course, when he’s been healthy.

A back injury kept Edmundson out of all but 24 games last season, and it came back to haunt him this season after a freak collision with Suzuki during an informal skate prior to camp.

He said on Monday that he had first suffered a back injury in 2013 and had otherwise never dealt with any before last year’s flare-up.

Now Edmundson’s crossing his fingers and hoping all that’s behind him.

We asked if he had ever considered surgery.

“Honestly, I never really looked into anything besides treating it the right way,” Edmundson said. “You could do surgery—a bunch of different procedures—but I want my career to go on for a long time and if you do surgery, you never know how it’s going to react and how you’re going to come back.

“I’m just glad I did it the right way. It might have taken a bit longer, but I know it’s going to help me in the long run.”

What did rehabbing “the right way” entail?

“Rest, and countless hours getting treatment,” Edmundson explained. The team sent me to see someone else here in Montreal to work on it, so that definitely helped. And reaching out to whoever I can. A lot of people reached out to me to try to put me in contact with the right people. It’s been a full-team effort. The trainers here have been unbelievable.”

And he’s finally feeling good again.

It’ll just take Edmundson a bit more repetition to get back into game shape and find his rhythm.