BOSTON – Kaiden Guhle was sitting in the dressing room after a high-paced Montreal Canadiens practice in Newark, N.J. on Friday. The team was feeling good about itself after an overtime victory in Columbus two nights earlier and it showed on the ice.
The expectations on this Canadiens team have been a point of emphasis since before the season even began, when the organization made an intentional and concerted effort to communicate to the public, and perhaps more importantly to their own players, that their hope would be to play meaningful games into March.
Then the Canadiens started the season with a 4-9-2 record and were sitting in last place in the NHL after 15 games on the morning of Nov. 10. The potential to play meaningful games in March was already nullified, that quickly.
And so, after that upbeat practice in Newark, Guhle was asked what the team’s expectations are now that the initial goal seems to have evaporated. And he communicated what coach Martin St. Louis has seemingly communicated to them.
“I don’t know if you guys have heard Marty say it, but now it’s just win more than we lose,” Guhle said Friday. “That’s an obvious kind of answer, but that’s our goal now. Just win more than we lose. I think a good mindset for us now is win two, win three, lose one. Try not to lose two in a row. I know it’s hard in this league, but that’s all we can worry about now.
“I think the worst thing we can do right now is try and look too far ahead or look behind us. We can’t look ahead to January or February. We’ve just got to stay in November, stay in December, live in the present.”
The Boston Bruins were celebrating their past Sunday afternoon, the first 100 years of the franchise’s history, with a who’s who of former Bruins greats taking the ice in a pregame ceremony.
And though the Canadiens were trying to stay in the present, they reverted to the past and to the version of themselves that — to re-hash a term St. Louis used repeatedly over those first 15 games — continuously shot itself in the foot.
After a decent start to the game — meant to erase the memory of a strong effort that turned into a last-minute loss in New York a day earlier — and Mike Matheson coming within an inch of providing the Canadiens with a 1-0 lead when his shot rang off the left post, a 70-second span of repeated shots directly into the their own foot essentially ended the game with a little over seven minutes to play in the first period.
Each of the three Bruins goals over that span were preventable. Could Cayden Primeau have provided them with a save or two? Of course. But the root cause of each goal was either poor coverage or needless turnovers, a defining feature of this team’s game at various points of the season.
The Canadiens gave up three goals in 70 seconds in the first period. (Natalie Reid / Imagn Images)
It’s what did them in eight days earlier when the Vegas Golden Knights embarrassed the Canadiens on home ice 6-2 by converting a steady stream of needless turnovers into goals. On Tuesday morning, before facing Utah HC at home, St. Louis insisted that game against Vegas had to be a one-off, that he was not going back to being a team that helped the opposing team with its own actions.
Less than a week later, the Canadiens were back to being that team.
“It’s just for me to keep hammering that home,” St. Louis said after the loss to the Bruins. “I’m not going back. We’re going to watch, we’re going to look at it. And I think it’s even more so on a back-to-back where you’re probably not as fresh as you need to be, so you can’t help the other team and dig yourself in a hole.”
What made it more difficult to digest was that the turnovers came from some of St. Louis’ trusted veterans, led by Matheson, who took responsibility for the loss and called the game one of the worst he’s ever played.
If anyone should know the need to simplify and take care of the puck when playing a back-to-back on the road, it should be a veteran like Matheson. And he knows it, which is why he fell on his sword after the game.
Though St. Louis has told his players the goal is to win more games than they lose, publicly his messaging has been that the Canadiens are learning how to win, which obviously suggests they don’t know how to do that yet.
And they demonstrated it against the Bruins.
Because even if the Canadiens were largely satisfied with how they played outside the 70-second span that cost them the game, they have too often taken some degree of satisfaction from how they’ve played in games when their mental lapses and turnovers had already put the game out of reach.
You’re not going to win more games than you lose when you gift-wrap goals for the other team, and when you continue doing that this late in the season, it suggests you’re not learning how to win, either.
On Friday, before this winless weekend against two stronger but vulnerable teams, Guhle expressed his belief that the Canadiens can accomplish their goal of winning more often than they lose, and he’s been carrying more than his share of the weight on his young shoulders on the blue line this season with his steady play under very difficult circumstances.
“I believe in this group,” he said Friday. “We showed last year and a lot of parts of this year that we can play. We’ve got good players, we’ve got good systems, we love this group, everyone in this group’s tight. We just had a shaky start. I don’t see why we couldn’t come out of this. I believe in this group.”
After the game in Boston, Guhle was asked why these lapses keep happening to a group he believes in. He paused.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “I don’t know, honestly. Obviously there’s mistakes in every game, s–t happens. It’s just making sure that when mistakes do happen, we help each other and we protect each other and keep the puck out of our net. You never go through any hockey game perfect, there’s no perfect game, no one plays a perfect game ever. It’s just when those mistakes do happen we’ve got to find a way to battle through that shift and get out of it without letting a goal in the back of the net.
“That’s exactly what that minute was — a couple of mistakes and we just didn’t keep the puck out of our net.”
This is part of learning how to win. And sometimes, lessons need to be repeated, even if this one has been playing on repeat all season.
But in terms of winning more often than they lose, if you look back from the 15-game mark onward, back when they were last in the NHL standings, the Canadiens have a 4-4-1 record.
They are not that far off from reaching that goal, as lofty as it may seem after a game like this. And the way the team has reacted since that 15-game start to the season is what made Guhle so hopeful prior to the weekend.
“I think defensively we became really tight and worked really hard on it,” he said Friday. “It was basically two weeks straight of every day, pounding that defensive game, battles in practice. That’s something that we needed at that time and we responded really well to it. That’s why I say I believe in this group, because I saw how much improvement we had over the two-week span and no one just went away and crawled into that hole we were in. Everyone wanted to come out of it and everyone wanted to be better.
“It’s a resilient group for sure, so that’s why I believe in us.”
Resilience is obviously a good quality for a team to have. The problem is the team continues to create reasons to be resilient.
(Top photo of Lane Hutson and Justin Brazeau: Natalie Reid / Imagn Images)
