St. Louis pushing for higher standards from Canadiens as losses pile up

DALLAS — Martin St. Louis took the white gloves off and put his coach’s hat on.

He separated Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield for the first time all season, placed Kirby Dach back at centre, scratched Evgenii Dadonov, plugged in Michael Pezzetta, and spread the ice around in what turned out to be a 4-2 loss for his Montreal Canadiens to the Dallas Stars at American Airlines Center. He wasn’t just rewarding Jonathan Drouin and Joel Armia—players who haven’t been able to score but who have been among his best over the past sequence of games—by placing them with the team’s best centre; he wasn’t just acknowledging Dach’s strong game in Colorado two nights prior as more evidence he could drive his own line; he wasn’t just boosting the fourth line’s role in recognition of its strong play; he was pushing buttons and sending messages.

That was before the game, when St. Louis hinted at changes without specifically revealing what they’d be, saying the Canadiens had to face the reality that their standard of play had slipped to an unacceptable level.

“I think we know as a group, we’re nowhere near in terms of our play,” St. Louis said after the morning skate on Friday. “We haven’t really played well…It’s just the truth of where we are. We’re capable of more.”

This was after the Canadiens stole a win in Arizona over a Coyotes team that dominated them to earn close to 70 per cent of the game’s best scoring chances on Monday, after he said his team stole a point from the Avalanche and would’ve outright robbed two if it had been on the winning side in overtime on Wednesday, and it was refreshing. For all of his time behind Montreal’s bench since he was hired last February, St. Louis had handled his team delicately—carefully fulfilling his primary mandate of seasoning a young, inexperienced group that’s navigating the early steps of a rebuild—but it had come time for him to show his teeth a bit.

Not that St. Louis was biting.

He was careful in his post-game commentary, as he always is, to not throw anyone under the bus.

Michael Pezzetta, who scored a goal and notched an assist against the Stars, had already done it to himself, saying, “I thought I was good until I took that stupid penalty,” but St. Louis didn’t wish to pile on.

Instead, the coach suggested Pezzetta’s trip in the third period was a bit of a questionable call, leading to one of the Stars’ three power-play goals on five opportunities the Canadiens handed them in the game.

St. Louis was asked why he placed Drouin and Armia—who remain as the only players to have not scored a goal this season after Jake Evans found his first to give the Canadiens a 1-0 lead—with Suzuki and took the suggestion that he wanted to help get both players going rather than saying he was just as interested in seeing Suzuki elevate his play after five games beneath the exceptional standard he had set for himself through the first 28 games of the season.

St. Louis was sheltering both his captain and Caufield by saying, “Suzy’s played with Cole ever since I’ve been here, and sometimes you take players like that away from each other a little bit and when you put them back together, usually they get going again,” and chalking it up as an experiment.

But within that comment, St. Louis at least admitted they weren’t going, and it was in the last 30 seconds of his six-and-a-half-minute post-game availability that he was even more revealing on that decision.

“I don’t raise the bar,” he said. “Once the player shows me where the bar is as they’re raising the bar, my job, our coaching staff’s job is to hold them accountable to that. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

It’s going to be what St. Louis and his staff have to do more of returning from the brief Christmas break.

The coaches have brought the Canadiens further along in their process than anyone expected they would through the first 34 games of the season, but they’re looking to lay more bricks on their foundation without dropping any.

Not everything they did worked on Friday, despite their satisfaction with a moderate improvement in their five-on-five game through 40 minutes thanks largely to the fourth line and the play of Dach on its second. Suzuki’s line was decimated, controlling less than 30 per cent of the shot attempts and surrendering a team-high five high-danger scoring attempts. Christian Dvorak’s, with Josh Anderson and Juraj Slafkovksy was just as ineffective. And the penalty kill was dominated by a Stars team that Evans said has scoring threats at every position—with Roope Hintz doing two-thirds of the damage and Wyatt Johnston doing the rest before Joel Kiviranta scored on an empty net.

At least St. Louis and his assistants are holding themselves and their players accountable, though.

There will be more work to do to get the power play to generate confidence and momentum, let alone goals, and much more work to do to coax out some discipline and consistency from the team.

That process resumes on the other side of the break.