Canadiens Quarter Report: Montreal still a young team searching for consistency

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — The Montreal Canadiens are 21 games into their season and, according to coach Martin St. Louis, have advanced in the process they embarked on in September.

“I feel like we’re staying the course,” he said after the Canadiens practised ahead of their flight to Columbus.

But, as St. Louis acknowledged, there have certainly been bumps in the road.

“It’s funny, you get better at something and then you slip somewhere else,” he said. “It’s constantly trying to improve. You have to be careful in being very specific in this is what we’re going to work on today, and I feel like we’ve done a good job of that. I feel our team is a better team than we were 20 games ago, and that’s our goal. It’s to keep improving.”

WHERE ARE THE CANADIENS RELATIVE TO EXPECTATIONS?

They’re about where they should be, hovering near .500 at 9-10-2 and still searching for the kind of consistency that would only naturally be elusive to the third-youngest team in the league.

They’ve been up and down, great at times and pretty far from it at others — and not just from game to game but also from period to period. It’s probably a win that there’s been about as much good from them as there has been bad, but just a marginal win.

Should there be a concern that only three of Montreal’s nine wins have come in regulation? Not necessarily, though it could (and probably should) be argued the Canadiens’ record is better than what it should be.

Knowing that, it seems clear they’re further away from being a playoff team than the gap between them and the Eastern Conference’s second wild card team indicates.

But hey, it’s not like anyone had the Canadiens penciled into a playoff spot before games began in October. Most people had them looking up at every other team in the Atlantic Division from Game 1 to 82 and probably would’ve been slapping their knees and hollering at anyone who’d have predicted they’d have the same record as the Buffalo Sabres a quarter of the way through. Especially if you told them Kirby Dach would be lost to a season-ending injury in Game 2.

“I think he’s a great player,” said Mike Matheson on Monday. “He was in the league at a very young age for a reason and it’s because he has so many abilities and can really transform the game with the puck.

"To see how much he was able to do last year, and he looked really great in camp, I think he’s a really great player and we’re lucky to have him and we’ll be excited to get him back next year. … He is very important to our team, and we’re obviously going to do our best to fill that void and have guys step up and fill the responsibility that he would’ve otherwise had.”

It hasn’t been easy so far, and it won’t be easy moving forward.

Just as it hasn’t been easy for the Canadiens to play 16 of the first 21 games without defensive stabilizer David Savard, but they’ve managed decently well in his absence.

Maybe the Canadiens will see an uptick when Savard returns in December.

Even still, management won’t be under any illusions of what the team will be capable of as they approach the halfway mark of the season and edge closer to the trade deadline.

That doesn’t mean it won’t expect to see something better than it did through the first quarter, though. Whether the results are as good, the hope would be there’s some progress with the process, that the expected goals percentage at five on five (which is currently third worst in the league at 45.12) improves by a couple of points and that the players mired in scoring slumps bust through.

FORWARDS GRADE: D-

Full disclosure, this template originally called for a top-six forwards grade and a bottom-six forwards grade, but it feels more appropriate to group all the Canadiens’ forwards together because their model really doesn’t fit the traditional mold. It’s more like they have two top-line forwards, nine middle-sixers and two bottom-liners.

Offensive leaders Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield, who each have six goals and 17 points, aren’t bringing this mark up as much as they could. They have been good, especially with Dach out and no one else on the team looking like a legitimate top-line option, but that’s all they’ve been.

Suzuki is on pace for 66 points, which would match his career high. Caufield would shatter his if he maintained, but he scored 46 goals over his last 83 games before this season started and is currently on pace for 23 in 82. And though neither would say they set specific targets before the season, knowing how much they each expect from themselves is knowing they’re probably anything but satisfied with how this has gone.

Alex Newhook, with six goals and 12 points, has made a case he can be a top-sixer. But not an overly convincing one.

And then there’s everybody else before you get to Michael Pezzetta and Jake Evans, who have been serviceable at the bottom.

Sean Monahan had a great start to the season before hitting a snag seven games ago, and Brendan Gallagher has appeared rejuvenated and is on pace for his first 20-goal season since the 2019-20 campaign.

Juraj Slafkovsky may not be burning up the scoresheet, but he’s clearly making progress after a slow start. So is Jesse Ylonen, who could chew more than he’s been given to bite.

The same cannot be said of Josh Anderson, who has just matched the longest drought of his NHL career and is still without a goal.

Rafael-Harvey Pinard is still searching for his first goal too, and it’ll be at least another five-to-seven weeks before he scores it as he continues to recover from a lower-body injury.

Christian Dvorak and Tanner Pearson have each played well-rounded hockey, but they haven’t provided as much offence as they need to.

Nobody really has — the Canadiens rank 31st in the NHL in scoring from forwards — hence the grade.

DEFENCE GRADE: B-

As a group, they’ve been reasonably effective, and they’ve been very strong offensively, producing 16 of Montreal’s 59 goals.

No defensive group in the league has scored more, and that’s a big part of the grade being what is.

“It’s hard to attack if your defencemen aren’t implicated,” said St. Louis. “We try to implicate them as much as possible while managing the risk we take.”

Matheson has been very implicated, scoring five of those 16 goals. He has 15 points to his name, and if he and some of the others had done as well managing the risk they’ve taken, the overall mark of the group would probably be better.

That said, Matheson, who’s minus-10, is playing 24:51 a night and hasn’t had a steady partner since the season got underway. He also has played banged up for part of it.

Kaiden Guhle also spent a stint on the sidelines with a concussion, but he’s been the best Canadiens defenceman over his 17 games. The 21-year-old, who has just 61 games of NHL experience, is showing signs of developing into an elite no. 1 in this league — averaging close to 21 minutes per game and shining at both ends of the ice.

Justin Barron may not be quite on that level, but he has emerged as a potential top-four stalwart since being scratched for the first three games of the season. The 22-year-old has four goals, six points and is plus-two while averaging 19:45 per game and regularly playing against stiffer competition than he’s ever faced.

There have been ups and downs for Johnathan Kovacevic, just as there were for Arber Xhekaj and Jordan Harris before both suffered injuries that are currently keeping them sidelined.

Jayden Struble has shown real promise through his first three games in the league, and we’ll see if that continues as he fills in.

Gustav Lindstrom doesn’t quite have the profile to supplant the stability Savard offers, but he’s shown better than he did in training camp.

Not enough, though, to impact the grade in a positive way.

GOALTENDING GRADE: A-

Samuel Montembeault, Jake Allen and Cayden Primeau have made the biggest contribution to the Canadiens’ record so far, with all three providing above average to excellent goaltending since the start of the season.

Montembeault ranks 16th in goals saved above expected among goaltenders who have made at least as many appearances as he has, and Allen and Primeau are both in the top half of the league in the category. They’re making the best of a difficult situation — sharing two nets at practice and filling the one in games less frequently than any of them would hope to.

Sure, none of them are statistically on par with the best goaltenders in the NHL in the traditional categories of save percentage and goals-against average. But almost all the ones ahead of them play for teams that are much better at suppressing shots and scoring chances than the Canadiens.

A BIG QUESTION FOR THE SECOND QUARTER:

Who gets traded first?

Will it be one of the goaltenders? Monahan? Pearson? Savard?

Tough to say, but it’s imaginable general manager Kent Hughes gets a hop on pushing out at least one player for futures between now and Jan. 12.

Sure, there will still be seven weeks to go to the deadline by the time the Canadiens complete the last of their next 20 games, but he has more than one player he’s all but certain to move on this list and it’s entirely possible some team steps up and offers what it would take between now and then.

Even if the Canadiens go on a good run over the next seven weeks, that probably won’t give Hughes much pause about it. They’d have to succeed well above expectation to give him any.