With points in six straight games after the Four Nations break, the Montreal Canadiens players earned the right to fight for a playoff spot. Unrestricted free agents were kept on board in hopes of a post-season.
The first game after the vote of confidence was in Calgary, but the Canadiens ran into a hot goalie and fell 1-0.
Wild Horses
With an Expected Goals of almost three, one would have thought the Canadiens could have counted to at least one. However, it was a night for goaltenders, and the Flames goalie was just slightly better than the Canadiens goalie.
Dustin Wolf isn’t expected to get a nomination for the Calder Trophy as top rookie but he sure looked like he deserved one, turning aside 26 shots to shut out the Canadiens. Cole Caufield was especially prolific with six shots, but he just couldn’t convert.
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Juraj Slafkovsky had another strong game as he has definitely picked up his play since the Four Nations break. Slafkovsky, and Caufield played nine minutes of the third period. Lane Hutson and Nick Suzuki played 10 minutes of the third.
Jakub Dobes had a stellar night stopping 23 of 24 shots.
Wild Goats
There’s nothing to pick apart. Even Owen Beck’s line had 12 minutes of ice and had a Goals Expected share of 82. In fact, that number is so powerfully excellent that head coach Martin St. Louis may have to stand up and take notice of it, and perhaps make a line combination change.
Josh Anderson was pushed up to the Beck line because of Patrik Laine suffering from an illness. The trio, completed by Alex Newhook, showed that even when Laine returns, they might want to keep Anderson on the line and drop Laine down.
Defensively, the three pairings had a Goals Expected between a 64 and 72 share. Nothing says that the Canadiens should have lost this game, except the play of Wolf who decided the fate of everyone with his excellence. Sometimes the goalie gets you, and you move on to the next city. That next city is Vancouver on Tuesday night.
Wild Cards
Owen Beck played eight minutes on Thursday night in Edmonton. Nick Suzuki played 24 minutes. That is unsustainable, but for the next 20 games, the Montreal Canadiens will try to make it work well enough to earn a playoff spot.
The trading deadline has passed and general manager Kent Hughes could not find a suitable deal to fill the second-line center role to help his club make the playoffs. It’s a tall order for the other centers to make up for the lack of experience that Beck has as the 2C on the Canadiens.
However, the Canadiens have gotten this far with the second line as a black hole the entire season, and the club is close to a playoff spot. That doesn’t change because there isn’t much difference between Beck and Kirby Dach.
Beck is actually defensively better than Dach, but Beck provides almost nothing offensively at the NHL level right now. He will improve, but at this moment, it’s a bridge too far to try to help Alex Newhook and Patrik Laine get 5-on-5 points. It’s a wash.
Improvement on the second line from the worst numbers in the league would have been massive, but GM Kent Hughes felt that the sellers were asking too high a price. Many centers available didn’t actually move.
One that did was Scott Loughton from Philadelphia. The Toronto Maple Leafs had to give up a first round pick to get him, and he is a third liner. That’s about the 25th pick overall the Flyers attained. It may have taken a first at 15th overall, and a strong prospect to acquire a second line centre, and Hughes could not pull the trigger.
It’s not a black mark for Hughes. In his tenure, he’s made the trades that he felt improved his club. He would have taken a center, if one were available for a workable price. The sellers got greedy. They didn’t move their product, and that’s an error from them.
Hughes also said he wanted to make a hockey trade, but again, he found no takers for his prospects, of which he imagined that all were available except David Reinbacher, Jacob Fowler, Michael Hage and Ivan Demidov. You can’t criticize someone if he can’t find any reasonable people.
While the absolute roster-must of a second-line center now gets pushed to the summer, it was also learned this trading deadline that Hughes has changed gears and the selling for picks is finished. What is beginning is the Canadiens pushing for a playoff spot.
On the block as unrestricted free agents were David Savard, Christian Dvorak, and Joel Armia. All three remained with the Canadiens as management sent the message to the players that they believed they had enough to make the playoffs.
When a team does nothing to improve their club at the trading deadline, that is usually a step back, because their competitors have made moves. However, on this deadline Montreal is fighting with seven clubs for the final playoff spots and none of them went to work aggressively.