St. Louis inspires Canadiens’ bounce-back performance, win over Capitals

MONTREAL — Martin St. Louis wanted to get something off his chest on Saturday morning.

“Honestly, and I want to be real careful how I word this,” The Canadiens’ coach started, and he was right to throw that caveat out before going any further. 

This wasn’t intended to be a complaint about the pervasively negative slant of headlines both in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s ugly 5-2 loss to the Minnesota Wild and over the following game-less days of the week; it was just a coach wanting to share his perspective with at least some of the media members who cover the team on a daily basis.

St. Louis was asked if he had just cast the Minnesota game aside in preparation for Saturday’s against the Washington Capitals, and that would’ve been the perfect opportunity for him to say it was already well in the past.

Instead, this came out:

“The focus has been so much on our special teams these last few days, and yeah you can look at it as a negative through one game, (but) I didn’t get many questions about our five-on-five that’s really good. You guys tend to focus a lot of the stuff that probably we need corrections, and I get it. Society is like that. In the dictionary, for every positive word you have four negatives, so we understand that we’re fighting that.”

St. Louis understood why all the questions about the Canadiens’ power play were lobbed his way between Tuesday and Saturday morning. His team had started Tuesday’s game by allowing two short-handed goals on the same power play for the first time since 2009, and it appeared shellshocked during Friday’s practice, so he was expecting it to be a hot topic both with him and his players.

But the coach said he felt the power play was getting more attention than it deserved after scoring two goals on four opportunities in the opening game — even if one was rescinded due to a coach’s challenge — and not getting overly tested in the second game of the season (a 3-2 win over Chicago). And then he finished his commentary with, “Three games into the season I’m not throwing anything out the window. These are all learning moments for our group, and I really like where we are. I’m not worried about the stuff that needs correction because we are going to work on them. I’m really happy with our five-on-five game. I know I’m going long on this, but there’s a lot to like.”

These were thoughts St. Louis developed over days, and they are the thoughts he shared with his team in the lead up to this 3-2 overtime win over the Capitals. 

St. Louis accentuated the positives from Wednesday morning to game-time Saturday. He reminded his players they had outscored their opponents 8-1 at five on five through the first three contests, he preached to them about being smarter with their sticks and keeping their feet moving to avoid the needless penalties that plagued them against the Wild and saw them accumulate the most infractions in the league through three games, and he walked the power-play players through an extensive practice and a long meeting and told them not to get too wrapped up in the negative buzz about their performance in that department.

And then the Canadiens went out and executed on their first opportunity of Saturday’s game, with Sean Monahan completing good plays from Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki to give them a 1-0 lead. 

I asked Josh Anderson if scoring on the first power play of the night felt like a bit of a middle finger to the critics.

He laughed, and then said, “I guess so.” 

“To be honest, we weren’t really worried about it too much coming into the game,” Anderson continued. “As long as we got good movement and saw things we were focused on in video and in practice, that was going to be good for us.”

After listening to St. Louis’ morning comment, it wasn’t exactly a mystery as to how that mindset developed.

“I think Marty’s the one who’s kind of been preaching it the most, about just staying positive,” said Caufield, who scored the game-winning goal 40 seconds into the extra frame.

St. Louis did that with the team, but also with the individuals.

On Thursday he was asked in a press conference for his evaluation of Suzuki’s game from the start of the season through the loss to Minnesota, and he didn’t mince his words.

“I’d say, and Nick would say it as well, that he has to be better,” St. Louis started. “But it’s a long season and he’s a guy with history in the league and I’m not worried about it coming back. With the number of minutes he plays and his role, Nick for sure needs to give us more, but it’s not something that’s worrying me. I’m not worried. Suzy will be there. He just needs to focus on next game and not look too far ahead.”

After Saturday’s game St. Louis wouldn’t get into what was said when he and Suzuki met this week, but the captain wasn’t trying to hide it after registering two assists, winning 11 of 16 face-offs and forcing the Capitals into several turnovers to help his line dominate possession and earn a 63 per cent share of the shot attempts at five on five.

“I had a pretty good meeting with Marty going over some stuff,” Suzuki said. “He knows the player I can be, and I know. And I think when I’m playing at my best, I’m hard to play against, and I wasn’t really doing that the first few games.”

And what tone was that message delivered in?

“He’s very encouraging,” said Suzuki. “He says and does all the right things for me and my game, and I think he’s one of the best coaches in the league already, and we’re lucky to have him.”

Suzuki said St. Louis’ mindset is “a breath of fresh air for the team,” and he wasn’t the only individual to benefit from it this week.

Everyone on the Canadiens did, including Justin Barron, who was playing his first game of the season Saturday because Kaiden Guhle was out with an upper-body injury.

There was so much negative attention on Barron’s game throughout training camp, so much buzz about his struggles with the puck, and St. Louis had heard it.

When I sat down with him prior to the start of the season for this interview, it came up.

“You guys are looking at the puck, but I’m looking at everything else you don’t see. He had a good camp,” St. Louis said to me. “I didn’t mind his camp at all, and I saw him in the right spots most the time. But you guys tend to look at the puck, and you tend to look at the negative, and I get it, because it’s easy to focus on what’s right in front of you.”

Barron ignored it and played 16 tidy shifts in Saturday’s game, moving the puck efficiently and proving steady in his own end.

“I thought he played great tonight,” St. Louis said.

He was pleased with his team’s performance, too, even if they gave up a two-goal lead with less than 10 minutes to go in the third and had to rely on Jake Allen to make several quality saves and on Caufield to score on a perfect shot to win.

St. Louis won’t just toss aside that problem, but he won’t get bogged down it in either; he’ll work on it with the Canadiens in practice and in the video room, just like he did when addressing the issues from Tuesday’s game.

“There’s so much positive, and to me, it’s hard sometimes to hear you guys focused on the negative,” he said. “I know you have to do your job, I get it. But it’s easy to get lost as a group because we’re chasing perfection knowing that we’ll never get there. It’s impossible. But we’re fixing things as we see it…”