MONTREAL — It was a game that was either tied or within reach all the way through until it was iced by the Minnesota Wild with an empty-netter at 19:29 of the third period, a game begging for a power play goal the home team just couldn’t conjure.
It’s somewhat hard to believe the Montreal Canadiens can’t seem to ever come up with one when they need it.
Not that we expect them to compete with the Globetrotters of the NHL — the Tampa Bay Lightning, Washington Capitals and Ottawa Senators, among other teams loaded with power play mavens — but they can do better than one goal on 21 opportunities through seven games.
One on Tuesday night would’ve at least brought the Canadiens to overtime and given them a chance to win.
Instead, they fumbled hard on their first try — not only losing every bit of momentum they generated through a great start to the game, but handing it right over to the Wild, who opened the scoring a little over two minutes after Montreal’s disjointed power play expired.
Too often, in the early part of this season, the Canadiens have run the man-advantage inefficiently, and it’s led to the same result: not registering a shot on net and surrendering momentum to their opposition. Before sputtering in Tuesday’s game, the Canadiens ranked 29th in the NHL in scoring chances per 60 minutes on the power play, 24th in high-danger shot attempts per 60 and 30th in power play goals.
Again, we don’t expect them to compete with the Ovechkins, Kucherovs and Girouxs of the world, but with scoring threats like Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Sean Monahan, Kirby Dach and Mike Hoffman (who often draws the ire of Canadiens fans for his decision-making on the power play but has produced 152 of his 432 NHL points there), the Canadiens should be better in this category.
On Tuesday morning, we asked coach Martin St. Louis what would make them so.
“Well, I think first we’ve got to generate more chances, and then producing will come after we generate more chances,” he said. “We can’t just wait for their PK to mess up, we have to make them mess up. We have to break them down a little bit. We can’t just hope that they have a missed assignment that may create a chance for us. We have to break it down.”
There was a point in Tuesday’s game where it appeared the Canadiens were poised to do that.
It was in the second period, eight minutes after Caufield tied the game 1-1, that Sam Steel kneed Jonathan Drouin and sent them back on the power play. The Canadiens immediately won the offensive-zone faceoff — they pulled back all four on their power play chances in the frame — and despite it bobbling over Chris Wideman’s stick and forcing them to regroup, they created a couple of scoring chances.
Then Wideman took a needless interference penalty 50 seconds later and killed whatever momentum was gained.
Arber Xhekaj got sucked into retaliating on Ryan Hartman, who was pestering him, and negated another Canadiens power play opportunity after Brendan Duhaime was going to the penalty box on his own for hooking.
It was a questionable call, but as St. Louis said afterwards, “When your team’s going to go on the power play, don’t give the referee an opportunity to call a penalty.”
“It’s an important part of the game,” he said.
The Canadiens didn’t have another power play chance before it was over — excluding Hoffman’s penalty shot in the third period, which goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury kicked aside to preserve the 2-1 lead.
The Wild wouldn’t have had it, though, had the Canadiens been able to manufacture anything on their other power play opportunities that resembled what they did right in the 50 seconds before Wideman took that interference penalty in the second period.
“We were creating shots,” said St. Louis. “I feel like against Dallas (in a 5-2 loss to the Stars on Saturday), I think one time we passed it seven, eight, nine times and we weren’t generating shots. So, to me, if you have to move it 10 times before you take a shot, it’s probably not the right strategy and you’re not breaking down the PK. To me, the good PP is two, three passes and a strike, and retrieve and do it again. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be a beautiful goal, but you have to have some strikes. You have to send pucks towards the net, and even if sometimes it doesn’t get to the net, you might break an opponent’s stick and it hurts blocking shots. And if guys are in the right places, usually you retrieve those and you do it again.
“But to think that we have to make 10, 12 passes before we shoot — you’re not breaking down the PK. We have to do a better job of that, and I thought we did that tonight.”
But the Canadiens are going to have to find a way to do that much more frequently, especially with play around the league tightening up at 5-on-5 as it typically does after the 10-game mark of the season.
They’re currently generating more rush opportunities at even strength than any other team in the league, but more and more of those will be closed off moving forward. Their power play will have to find a way to generate positive momentum and score much more frequently.
“We have to keep it simple,” said Monahan. “We need to shoot more and have a guy in front of the net. We have to get the puck to the net, have a five-second rule and create chaos. That’s when seams open up and goals start to come.”
A bit more of that on Tuesday likely would’ve had the Canadiens on the winning side of the outcome.
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