MONTREAL — There was Kaiden Guhle, cornered by Calle Jarnkrok and Alexander Kerfoot, pressured into the left quadrant of his own zone with no outlet option in sight.
With the puck on his stick, Guhle pivoted, sidestepped Kerfoot, stickhandled through the trap, walked around Jarnkrok and fired a tape-to-tape pass across his own blue line and over the red line to Rem Pitlick, who dumped the puck out of harm’s way and into Toronto’s zone.
It was a subtle, smart play from the defenceman that almost made you forget for a second that he was playing in his first-ever NHL game.
Guhle, who only turns 21 in January, didn’t just look comfortable; he appeared confident. And not just on this play, but on almost all of them he made in this surprising 4-3 win for the Montreal Canadiens in their opening game against a Toronto Maple Leafs team that has Stanley Cup aspirations this season.
He wasn’t the only kid in a Montreal jersey who took a step forward in his development on this night, though his would have to be seen as the largest — playing a team-leading 22:34 and holding the NHL’s most lethal scorer in Auston Matthews to zeroes through all nine minutes and 33 seconds he faced off against him at 5-on-5.
“Pretty calm, cool, confident, relaxed kid, and you can tell that in his game,” said Jake Allen, who made 29 saves behind Guhle and the rest of the Canadiens defence. “He doesn’t get rattled, I don’t think, too much.”
Guhle never appeared rattled, not even when he made mistakes. And he did make mistakes — turning the puck over four times with passes that missed the mark or came off his stick in a way he didn’t intend for them to.
But Guhle recovered well.
So did his young teammates.
Take Arber Xhekaj, for example. The undrafted 21-year-old was also making his Canadiens debut Wednesday and it didn’t go particularly smoothly all the way through.
He gave up two breakaways in a short span of the second period — one of them forcing him to hook Kerfoot and offer him a penalty shot Allen inevitably stopped — and got caught swinging out of position on the goal Denis Malgin scored to put the Leafs up 2-1 near the halfway mark of the frame.
But Xhekaj didn’t let that affect him.
“For me, when I play, I block out everything around me and play the same game I’ve been playing my whole life,” he said afterwards. “I just stick to my game and shake it off and play. It’s my first game and there’s going to be nerves, but you just keep going. If you look back on your mistakes and keep them in your mind during a game like that, you’re not going to go anywhere.”
Xhekaj shook those plays off, got a couple of good scoring chances, contributed to a penalty kill that held Toronto scoreless through four opportunities, and he emerged from it all — after Josh Anderson sealed the win for Montreal with 17 seconds remaining — feeling happy to come through with a better understanding of how it goes at this level.
Juraj Slafkovsky experienced it similarly.
The first-overall pick in the 2022 NHL Draft was a ball of nerves to start. When he was introduced to the crowd at the Bell Centre, he was so caught up in the ovation he received that he forgot to stop at centre ice as instructed and skated right to his spot next to Anderson.
Minutes later, on one of his first shifts of the game, Slafkovsky wasn’t looking and crashed right into Guhle as the defenceman was attempting to skate the puck out of Montreal’s zone.
“That helped me, probably,” he said. “I woke up after that.”
Slafkovsky settled in, drew his team a power play, had a couple of nice rushes, recorded a shot on net and was greeted in the locker room after the win by the only other Slovak in Canadiens history to wear his number 20.
“I told him to enjoy the city,” said Richard Zednik, who played five seasons in Montreal from 2001-06. “I told him it’s a great hockey city to play in and the fans are going to love you and just keep skating and don’t think too much on the ice. Just skate and play your game.”
Jordan Harris, the 22-year-old who got 10 games in with the Canadiens last season, seemed to be doing exactly that throughout this one.
The defenceman registered his first NHL assist on Sean Monahan’s first goal as a Canadien, which made it 3-2 Montreal with 2:30 remaining in the third period, and he played mostly mistake-free through his 25 shifts.
But Harris wasn’t perfect. He high-sticked Malgin three minutes before Monahan scored, and that could’ve been very costly.
“He played awesome, though,” said Xhekaj.
All the Canadiens kids fared well, from Harris to Slafkovsky, and from Nick Suzuki to Cole Caufield.
The 23-year-old Suzuki, in his first game as Canadiens captain, set 21-year-old Caufield up for Montreal’s first goal at the 33-second mark of the second period, and Caufield added another just under 15 minutes later.
All in all, pretty positive.
“We’ll see what happens when normalcy kicks in and the emotions drop,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis. “I’m eager to see what they look like when that happens.
“But honestly, it’s fantastic what we’re seeing from the kids.”
None of them showed better than Guhle, but all of them took steps forward in this win.
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