DETROIT— The seeds of Montreal’s first loss of the season were sown a day before they even stepped on the ice at Little Caesar’s Arena, planted in the office new Detroit Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde now occupies.
It was on Thursday morning that the two-time Stanley Cup-winning Lalonde — who took over from Jeff Blashill after assisting Jon Cooper for four years in Tampa Bay — divulged his plan on how exactly his team would have to play to beat the Canadiens. After watching video of Montreal’s 4-3 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs on Wednesday, and studying the analytics that covered the period from Martin St. Louis’ arrival behind the Canadiens bench to his arrival in Detroit for Friday’s game, Lalonde laid it out for the media.
Respectfully, he framed it as how not to lose to the Canadiens.
“Since Marty took over, they are a really good rush team,” the 50-year-old said. “Statistically, a good rush team, they get offence off the rush, they produce off the rush, and if you’re going to give them the rush, it’s going to be a long night. And I think it’s a perfect challenge for us. Where we’re trying to improve some things in our game is going to be an exact result of giving ourselves a chance for success against Montreal. If we’re going to feed them easy off the rush, it’s going to be a long night. They have many players who are very comfortable off the rush to make plays.”
The Red Wings didn’t let them.
They managed the puck to near perfection in this 3-0, home-opening win, not allowing the Canadiens to get anywhere near goaltender Ville Husso through two periods. They gave up their first high-danger scoring chance 6:30 into the third period and gave up only one more before Michael Rasmussen and Olli Maata scored empty-net goals and joined 6-foot-8 rookie Elmer Soderblom on the scoresheet to seal the deal.
But the Red Wings also applied pressure in all the right areas of the ice, while somehow never forcing the issue.
There were times when the Red Wings were in an 0-5 trap, but they spent most of the night in a 1-1-3 formation — locking their own blue line and forcing the Canadiens to play a game they appeared disinclined to play.
“We know how we have to play against them,” said former Canadien Ben Chiarot a day prior. “They’re the third-best team on the rush since Marty took over, so we just have to wait and shut it down.”
Bingo.
Detroit served up a lesson. Less so with their 25-shot barrage in the first, and more so by choking the life out of the game in the second period — and especially after Soderblom scored 2:33 into the third period.
“This is a game we’ll learn a little bit from,” said Martin St. Louis, “and we’ll be better for it.”
The Canadiens will have to.
They’re going to face many teams this season who will give them a much harder time than the Maple Leafs did on opening night; teams that will employ the same tactics the Red Wings did to beat them.
Against teams who sit back and let the play come to them — unlike Toronto, which gave up 12 odd-man rushes and nine scoring chances from the high-danger zone at 5-on-5 — they’ll have to find a way to break through in other ways.
“We tried to rush a lot of stuff and just ended up playing into their hands,” said Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki. “We talked about that in the second and third that, just when you had the puck, it just seemed like they weren’t coming towards us and we had time to make plays and come together. I think we just tried to rush it a little bit too much.”
Never mind the surge the Canadiens allowed in the opening frame, when Allen was forced to be otherworldly while they were scrambling to keep the Red Wings at bay after Kaiden Guhle suffered an injury that left them down to five defencemen. They survived that pressure, despite leaving Allen to tie the franchise record he set himself last March for most saves in a period and not finding ways to “keep that puck going and beat two guys with one play,” as St. Louis put it.
The biggest challenge the Canadiens had, was finding a way to break the trap and do a bit of what the Red Wings did while in possession of the puck.
“They chipped a lot of pucks, they dumped a lot of pucks,” said St. Louis.
The Red Wings didn’t try to pass through Montreal’s trap because they didn’t want to feed their transition game. They simplified things and took what was given to them.
The Canadiens will learn to do the same.
The easy break-in with the puck wasn’t available to them in this game. It won’t be there for them on a lot of nights, and they’ll have to work on ways to adjust to that.
Considering how their early-season opponents have already identified their biggest strength and how one has already neutralized it, they have no choice. Others will test their patience — and their willingness to generate offence the hard way — which is something they have to know after how this game went for them in Detroit.
“You’ve gotta play the game, you can’t just be like, ‘Okay, we’re going to play this way tonight,’” said St. Louis on Friday morning. “It’s not always going to be the way you think it’s going to be. Are you willing to put pucks in right spots so you can extend end-zone time now and spend some time in their zone? We can’t just be an off-the-rush team and think we’re going to be successful all year.”
If it wasn’t clear to the Canadiens before, it sure will be after this frustrating night in Motor City.