Defensive And Goaltending Woes Lead The Canadiens To Another Defeat

After a successful road trip despite the humiliating loss suffered in Denver, the Montreal Canadiens were back at home to take on the Ottawa Senators at the Bell Centre. Just like Montreal, Ottawa had been obliterated in its last game and was also looking to bounce back.

Given how heated a rivalry this one has become, everyone was expecting a spirited tilt with plenty of rough stuff. Still, the visitors were clearly instructed to focus on playing hockey rather than spending too much time and energy on extracurricular activities. As a result, the Habs dominated in the hits column, but that was their only victory on the night.

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While it’s nothing new, it’s impossible to report on this game without mentioning Samuel Montembeault. After having a good game against the Vegas Golden Knights last week, the hope was that the Becancour native was on his way back up, but tonight’s game crushed those hopes.

After 40 minutes, he had given four goals on 21 shots for a .810 save percentage, but beyond the stats, it’s his behaviour in net that was the most worrying. Without Mike Matheson and the post’s help, he would have given another two goals.

It’s hard to say why, but the puck appears to be a hot potato to him these days. His glove is either too slow to catch the shots, or he feels like they are burning him, for whatever reason, he drops an incredible number of shots. Worse, once he has dropped them, he’s not quick enough to recover the puck and freeze it.

Of course, the rest of the team could help by clearing the pucks he stopped, but on a few occasions on Tuesday night, he had more than the time needed to recover the puck, and he couldn’t do it.

Tom Cochrane once sang that Life Is A Highway, and tonight, that’s precisely what the Canadiens’ slot was. Somehow, in a game where Montreal threw 33 hits and applied good forecheck, Ottawa was able to get into the slot easily and take shots from dangerous areas. After the match, Martin St-Louis was clear about what the problem was:

The other team defended way harder than we did; we lost a lot of battles, and defensively, we weren’t there. The other team just defended itself better than us.

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However, the bench boss refused to put it down to the system he has his men playing:

I won’t talk about the system. You can play any system, but you have to be alert; the system has nothing to do with this.

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Asked why that performance happened tonight, the coach said he had no idea why they could be so good at doing something one night, and then so bad at the same thing another night. He added:

If I show clips, they can all see, they could teach it themselves, they know the rules, they know everything you know. So, it’s an attitude.

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It was clear tonight that St-Louis was irritated by his men’s performance and that he didn’t have an answer for how to fix what appears to be the problem. He said that issues like that start with the individuals. As for Nick Suzuki, he talked about mental errors, and in the end, that’s what it comes down to. You can understand the system perfectly, but if you make a bad read because of a lack of concentration, you’re going to find yourself in trouble and land your team in it as well.

There’s no denying that the Senators' captain has got his pest number down to a T. He gets under the Canadiens’ skin, and most of the time, he does it without getting sent to the box for it. Furthermore, he consistently contributes offensively.

In the first frame, he set up the Senators’ second goal as he was battling hard by the boards and even though he was more or less carrying Jayden Struble on his back, he managed to dish a perfect no-look pass to Artem Zub in the slot, who only had to push the puck past an unsuspecting Montembeault. Then, in the final frame, he scored Ottawa’s fifth goal, the one that sucked out what little air was left in the Bell Center and sent a lot of fans to the exit.

All through the night, he mixed it up with Habs players and escaped unscathed. In the second frame, as he was trying to get off the ice, Struble had him tied up. He flipped the situation on him when he hung tight to the defenseman’s stick and forced him to go back to play with no twig, hardly suitable for a defenseman Then, at the start of the third, when the Canadiens desperately needed a goal, he let himself fall on Suzuki who was already on the ice and stayed there for what seemed like an eternity, taking the Habs’ captain out of the play.

This 5-2 defeat, following the collapse in Colorado, has to hurt. Alexandre Carrier said after the game that the important thing was how they would respond on Wednesday against the Winnipeg Jets. Still, the fact is that they didn’t respond after their bad game in Colorado, and that should be worrying.

St-Louis can say until he’s blue in the face that he’s not worried about how few shots his team takes, but when your goaltenders are regularly giving four or five goals, you need to score more, and in the NHL, that won’t happen with minimal shooting. The league’s netminders are professionals, and if you don’t overload them with shots, odds are they won’t make many mistakes.

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