Canadiens continue upwards trend in dominant win over Oilers

MONTREAL — It’s an old hockey cliché that usually gets spit out by a goaltender who doesn’t let any pucks get by him in a game.

“A shutout is a team stat,” he’ll say, though one rarely belongs as much to the team as it does the goaltender.

When Samuel Montembeault bailed the Montreal Canadiens out in Game 1 of this season (making 48 saves against a Toronto Maple Leafs team that dominated every category but goals), that shutout belonged exclusively to him.

But on Monday, against Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and the offensively potent Edmonton Oilers, the Canadiens made Montembeault an honest man when they left him saying: “The team played great in front of me.”

Montembeault uttered those words at centre ice, speaking as the first star of a game he was never forced to be great in.

The Canadiens were so dominant they made you wonder how they could possibly be the same team we saw in that first game against the Maple Leafs—and for many games that followed, when they were so defensively fallible that they’d have needed Montembeault to somehow best that first performance.

Watching the Canadiens out-work the Oilers all over the ice, watching them generate 51 shot attempts to Edmonton’s 34, 22 scoring chances to Edmonton’s 12 and 12 high-danger chances to Edmonton’s four at five-on-five made us wonder if they’ve raised their standard to a level they can consistently achieve.

It wasn’t a one-off. The Canadiens were defensively stalwart against the supremely structured Minnesota Wild less than a week ago (despite losing 3-0) and coupled the same kind of effort with strong offence in a 5-1 win over the Columbus Blue Jackets Saturday and this 3-0 win over the Oilers on Monday. 

Something appears to have clicked into place, and it’s imaginable to them it only gets strengthened by the last two favourable results.

“For sure,” said Mike Matheson, who set up Montreal’s first goal against Edmonton (Brendan Gallagher’s eighth of the season.) “I think we were able to not get clouded by the emotions in Minnesota. I think we were able to stay real with that, and real with the games we played terrible too. 

“We played well today, but I think we’ve got better. That isn’t the ceiling, and we won’t rest on our laurels. We’ve got more.”

The Canadiens will have to prove it.

But if they can, that’ll bode well for continuing to correct a 5-10-2 start to the season.

This team was leaving us with no other conclusion to draw other than it was regressing in nearly every way through half-hearted defensive efforts and at least one game that left coach Martin St. Louis talking about how the Canadiens puked all over themselves.

They’re giving us something different now.

All of them—and at both ends of the ice, with smart, mature, organized and connected play.

It’s a pretty big leap from where things stood less than two weeks ago, when St. Louis was repeating over and over again that the Canadiens needed to stop helping their opponents.

His song sounded different following Monday’s game.

“When teams play loose on us, we can expose them because I feel we have a good offensive game,” St. Louis said. “And some games they’re not going to give you that, so you’ve gotta grind a little bit, you’ve gotta put pucks in good spots, and you’ve gotta trust the forecheck, and you’ve gotta try and start your o-zone.” 

That’s what the Canadiens did against the Wild, Blue Jackets, and once again against the Oilers.

If you want a sense of how bought in they all were to that plan on Monday, not one of their lines had less than a 66.8 per cent share of the expected goals at five-on-five and their fourth topped out at 88.81 per cent.

The entire defence kept McDavid, Draisaitl and every other dangerous Oiler at bay, putting in a gutsy performance typified by Kaiden Guhle, who blocked an Evan Bouchard bomb in the first period that left him writhing in pain and sent him running down the Canadiens’ tunnel for scans to see if his hand was broken.

Guhle returned for the second period, and then scored 5:52 into the third to make it 2-0 after Cole Caufield outmuscled Draisaitl (who’s 35 pounds heavier) and set him up.

That goal was the fruit of some highly responsible, determined play, which continued all the way to the end—even after Jake Evans scored into an empty net with 3:08 to go.

Hey, Montembeault played well. He made 30 saves in the game.

But this game (like the two that came before it) was more a credit to everyone in front of Montembeault’s net.

“We’re doing a really good job at managing our risk, and to me, that’s a big part of the actions that don’t help the other team,” said St. Louis. “Especially a team like tonight—they’re just waiting for you to try a ‘Maybe this might work.’ They just live off maybes. I felt tonight we had a lot of 100 per cent plays, we really managed our risks.”

Now the Canadiens must manage their emotions and continue to do it.

As Gallagher said, they deserve to enjoy this win through Tuesday’s day off.

But the Canadiens have a lot of work to do to turn this win and the one against Columbus into their first three-game streak of the season when the Vegas Golden Knights visit the Bell Centre Saturday.

What St. Louis has seen from them of late has him confident they’ll commit to that work.

“I think we’ve been very businesslike, very workmanlike,” he said. “We just show up, we work, we do our thing. I think it starts with the attitude of the group and understanding what’s going to help you be successful collectively. We played really well in some games we lost and we stayed even keel. “Tonight, we played a really good game. It’s two (wins) in a row…To me it’s just staying the course and being businesslike and not getting too high or getting too low and just focusing on: Can we be the best version of ourselves each and every day?”

No team achieves that level of consistency. 

Just ask the Oilers, who are better than their 9-8-2 record and eager to start showing it.

The Canadiens must continue with the blueprint they’ve followed over the last few games to show they’re better than their 7-10-2 record. Doing so would inspire some confidence they won’t require Montembeault to walk on water just to earn a shutout.