It was last Wednesday in Brossard, Que., that Montreal Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis essentially admitted his tired and banged-up team was in survival mode.
That was the same day it was announced that Kaiden Guhle underwent surgery to repair a torn quadriceps muscle suffered in a loss to the Winnipeg Jets a night earlier. That loss to the Jets was Montreal’s third straight, and with upcoming games against the Minnesota Wild, Anaheim Geese, San Jose Sharks, Los Angeles Kings, New Jersey Devils and Tampa Bay Lightning leading into the 4 Nations, St. Louis called his team’s next segment “a chase for rest.”
What the Canadiens haven’t found a way to do since he said is dash.
They were moving in slow motion in a loss to the Wild last Thursday, leaving St. Louis talking about how they lacked “juice.” And after a sloppy loss in Anaheim Sunday and a squeaky of a win in San Jose on Tuesday, they dragged themselves out in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
The result: a 6-3 loss to the Kings that made you wonder how this team is possibly going to steal points away from the Devils and Lightning on Super Bowl weekend matinees to salvage this segment and stay in the playoff race.
Those teams play in Fifth Gear and the Canadiens can’t get out of impartial right now.
They were in the park (with the emergency brake on until the start of Wednesday’s game), allowing one goal and eight shots to get to Jakub Dobes in the first 1:39 of play, and every time they revved their engine, they then slipped off the clutch and left the engine pulverizing as it dug into a stall.
Hey, give the Kings credit. They’re the best hometown team in the NHL and looked it from start to finish. They looked rested, fresh and ready for a Canadiens team that played in Northern California the night before, and they asserted themselves accordingly.
As a result, the Kings never looked seriously threatened by Montreal’s advances.
Their first lead was erased on a fluke shot — Mike Matheson took out Drew Doughty and Darcy Kuemper — but they got their second on a Warren Foegele penalty early in the second period.
Brandt Clarke made it 3-1 in the 15th second of the third period before Alex Service He would check one in for the Canadiens to narrow the gap once again.
But Kevin Fiala answered just six minutes later to make it 4-2 Kings. And he added a second goal just 35 seconds after Logan Mailloux got the Canadiens back within one.
Trevor Moore’s empty net with 2:30 to play left the Canadiens doubled over.
“Honestly, I think everyone gave the most they had tonight,” Matheson told reporters in attendance.
But the most the Canadiens had wasn’t enough.
The Canadiens haven’t had enough to give for more than two weeks, with the flu rolling through the team, with fatigue from their crazy post-Christmas schedule, with important players like Guhle and Emil Heinemen dealing with injuries and others – like Josh Anderson and David Savard – playing hurt. And if they don’t dig deep into the reserve tank this weekend, they’ll spend the 12-day break thinking about how they destroyed all the work they did to climb out of the NHL basement.
This team has the heart, as evidenced by its remarkable run from mid-November to mid-January to undo a start that saw it lose 13 of its first 17 games.
But the legs are wobbly, and it’s hard to imagine them pumping at full capacity against any team, let alone two burners like the ones they’ll face at Bell Middle on Saturday and Sunday.
We’ll see what the Canadiens are made of.
Wins would give them a .500 record over their “break chase,” and that would be a miraculous result when you consider how they’ve looked in these games.
But they don’t have a chance of winning those games if they look like they did in Los Angeles on Wednesday.