SAINT PAUL, MINN. — You could tell this wasn’t going to be the Montreal Canadiens’ night as soon as the first period ended with them goal-less on 15 shots — five of them off top sniper Cole Caufield’s stick.
When Jake Allen kicked a rebound into the slot and allowed Mason Shaw to beat him through the five-hole to give the Minnesota Wild a 1-0 lead in the second period, it was pretty much confirmed. It was then double and triple confirmed after Kirill Kaprizov took over the game with consecutive goals worthy of his superstar stature to give the Wild a 3-0 lead on Tuesday.
Things went as well for the Canadiens in the third period as they did for their heart-and-soul winger, Brendan Gallagher, on a single shift in the frame, when he was tackled to the ice and punched in the head by Jared Spurgeon before he got up and got clotheslined on his way out of the offensive zone.
But in Gallagher’s image, the Canadiens just kept on coming. They never wilted, never stopped pushing the pace, never broke.
That’s what’s different at the start of this season versus the start of the disastrous 2021-22 campaign, over which the Canadiens went 2-8 and got massacred in half their games. This edition of the team was built to be worse, but they’re a surprising 5-5-0 out of the gate due to their resiliency.
“I’m just really proud of the guys just to find ways,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis hours before this 4-1 loss at Xcel Energy Center and less than 48 hours after coming back with a 7-4 win from down 3-1 at the halfway point of the game against the Blues in St. Louis. “There’s no perfect games. Hockey’s a game of mistakes, and we make plenty. But our good is really good, too. So, I’m really impressed to me how good our good is. So, I feel like we’re futher along with that than I thought we would be…
“What I like is we’re not bad for a long time. It’s small amount of time in the game where we don’t let it slip away. We bend, but we don’t break. I think it’s been important that when teams are surging on us and it looks like it’s going bad, I think we find a way to understand how important the next shift is and now we get a hold of it again and then we start from there. When it’s gone bad and you’re down, well, how do you start? It’s how you build. You build throughout a game, and you build throughout a season, and there’s nothing you can do about what just happened that was bad. You have half a period, half a game left, and that’s what we focus on. I think the group has been really good at that.”
That’s what the Canadiens did once again on Tuesday, even though the result went against them.
“I felt like we outplayed them for the whole game almost,” said captain Nick Suzuki, and he was right. The Canadiens outshot the Wild 35-31, out-hit them 16-15, won 62 per cent of the faceoffs and controlled play throughout.
Shaw’s goal was one Allen would’ve loved to have had back, but he kept fighting to keep the Canadiens in it.
Suzuki got one back on the power play with 6:30 to play, and Gallagher came busting up the gut on the very next shift and was thwarted by Marc-Andre Fleury in his attempt to get the Canadiens to 3-2.
Their teammates came in waves after that, and then Suzuki’s line notched a minute-long shift of pressure in Minnesota’s end before St. Louis opted to pull Allen during a TV timeout.
Matt Boldy sealed it for the Wild with an empty-netter 22 seconds later, and yet the Canadiens kept fighting from down 4-1 over the final three minutes of the game. Literally.
It was after 18-year-old rookie Juraj Slafkovsky was dumped by the bench with 32 seconds remaining that Jake Evans scrapped with Shaw. Arber Xhekaj, Chris Wideman and Sean Monahan piled on the penalty minutes in retaliation.
“It wasn’t a big deal, but it still got addressed as a group,” said St. Louis. “Like, pack mentality, and I like it. When you have that, you know your team’s together and it’s coming together and they have each others’ backs. Without making a big deal out of any particular incident, we just have each others’ back, and it’s nice to see.”
It’s foundational to the culture the Canadiens are trying to build moving forward, and to have it out of the gate — as well as this belief and resiliency that’s been established — is the biggest positive through the opening segment of the season.
And while the emphasis has rightly been on the individual development of the team’s youngest players, big steps have been taken towards the development of the collective.
Wins over Toronto, Pittsburgh, Arizona, Buffalo and St. Louis have stimulated that growth, but so have the losses in which the team has never abandoned the cause.
“Our resilience has been really high, I think,” said Suzuki.
What’s inspired that?
“Just the style of play and the guys that we have in the locker room,” Suzuki said. “(We’re) always battling, we know we’re never out of it down two, down three. We’ve got the talent to come back and guys to make big plays, and I think Marty does a good job of motivating us and keeping us levelheaded at the task at hand.”
The coach said he wanted to see how the Canadiens would respond once the adrenaline of the first few games faded and normalcy kicked in, and a late-October-early-November trip that will end in Winnipeg on Thursday, after stops in Buffalo, St. Louis, Minnesota, has brought plenty of normalcy but taken nothing away from his team’s effort.
The Canadiens lost in Minnesota, and they appeared destined to even as they stepped off the ice tied 0-0 after a period.
But they’re on their way to Winnipeg having gained a lot through the first eighth of the season.
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