Even in loss to Hurricanes, Canadiens show they can play how St. Louis wants them to

Admittedly it was an odd question, because I didn’t expect to be able to relate his answer to something to do with the Montreal Canadiens, but I asked Martin St. Louis last Friday about how he navigated the majority of his Hall of Fame career without ever really absorbing too many devastating hits. I always thought it was a superpower of his and really wanted to know what he’d say.

We’re talking about a guy generously listed at 5-foot-8 and 176 pounds, who played the bulk of his 1241 games (regular season and post-season combined) in one of the NHL’s most bruising eras. He was a guy who always played on the inside and so rarely on the periphery. So it’s astounding that St. Louis somehow only ended up missing 42 games due to injury from his debut in 1998 to his retirement in 2015.

That could logically be attributed to some good luck, a whole lot of toughness, speed, shiftiness, and incredible skill.

But St. Louis pointed to something else that eventually ended up coming back into focus for me watching the team he coaches play in a 6-2 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes on Thursday.

“I just moved the puck,” he said. “They can’t hit you when you don’t have the puck. I’m a big believer in working hard on and off the puck. I had one-on-one abilities, but I never played a one-on-one game.

"I feel hockey’s a two-man game, it’s how to two-on-one the opponents all over the ice, and I felt that was one of my biggest strengths was when the puck was on my stick, it was for a reason, and when it was off my stick it was obviously for a reason, too—to avoid a hit and move by people without the puck and get open.”

St. Louis was talking about his elite processing of the game, about making the right reads at the right moments and about not only avoiding catastrophe but turning his opponent’s aggression into a weakness and his own weakness into a strength.

On Thursday, watching the way his Canadiens spent the first 40 minutes of their game countering a Hurricanes team that hunts and kills nearly every team in its path, his words really resonated.

When the Hurricanes bottled the Canadiens up in their end, the Canadiens were mostly able to push the play to the outside and keep the slot relatively clear. When they went full cyclone into their suffocating, five-man forecheck, with wingers swirling full-throttle after chipped-in pucks and defencemen shutting down the walls, the Canadiens had the wherewithal to avoid playing into that. Instead, they flipped pucks out, caught up to them in the neutral and created odd-man opportunities.

They had three before Michael Pezzetta opened the scoring on a half-breakaway Rem Pitlick sent him in on, and they had eight more before half the game was played. They went to the second intermission tied 2-2, with a chance to extend their winning streak to four games against a team that had won 12 of its last 14 and eight consecutive games at home.

And then the Canadiens came undone over the first six minutes of the third and broke from the concept of a team playing in its coach’s image. Meanwhile, Hurricanes leaned into their style, which very much embodies the way their Hall of Fame player-turned-coach, Rod Brind’Amour, played through his entire career.

The Canadiens made mistakes on goals given up to Jesperi Kotkaniemi and Seth Jarvis in the first period, but none as wholesale and egregious as the ones made on the three early third-period goal scored by Sebastian Aho, Jarvis and Jordan Staal.

They’ll take lessons from that.

But hey, the Canadiens were severely outmatched and still came out of the game with a lot of positives to take from how they played for most of this one. They would’ve been a heavy underdog with their full team healthy, and they were practically dead to rights with so many regulars out and their hottest player, Kirby Dach, a late scratch due to a non-Covid related illness.

But they hung tough and smart until skating right into the type of open-ice hit St. Louis seemingly avoided his whole career.

“We just let it slip and got a little complacent,” said Pezzetta to reporters in attendance.

That was all it took for the Hurricanes to bust it wide open.

Jarvis completing the first hat trick of his career with 20 seconds left to make it 6-2 was just an aftershock.

But what the Canadiens should continue to build on is how they wisely charted their way through the majority of this game, just as they had through three wins few expected them to earn coming into it—and through many other games this season.

St. Louis always says he wants them to play the game in front of them, to play within the concepts he preaches but to read and react and adjust accordingly and essentially out-smart their opponents, and they’ve made a lot of progress in that.

Earlier in the day, it was funny to hear the coach push back against the notion he wants the Canadiens to play in the image he cultivated as a player.

“No, I wish I was bigger,” St. Louis said.

But then he added, “For sure, I have ideas and concepts I’m bringing from my experience…The challenge of a coach is to convince their team to execute that and to teach them.”

It’s early in the process and, as St. Louis pointed out after the game, playing a well-oiled machine like the Hurricanes shows how many more steps the Canadiens need to take.

But there were lots of signs within Thursday’s performance that showed they’ve taken some already, and that’s progress. They can be who they’re hoping to become down the line if they keep taking steps on that same path St. Louis skated so brilliantly as a player.