Lane Hutson was over a minute into his three-on-three overtime shift when he cut off a two-on-one pass Aliaksei Protas had labeled for John Carlson and started the play that gave the Montreal Canadiens a well-deserved 3-2 win over the East-leading Capitals in Washington.
It was Hutson’s 28th assist of the season, and it fittingly came off a brilliant defensive effort that coincidentally sent Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki off to the races on a two-on-one of their own.
Because for as much ink as there has been spilled over Hutson’s offensive acumen — about his ankle-busting dangles from the blue line and his ability to not only see passes others wouldn’t conceive of but also execute them with regularity — the kid wouldn’t have a chance to show any of it off without doing all the other stuff he barely gets credit for at the other end of the ice. So, to see it all come together on one play was fitting.
You know what else was fitting? Listening to a player who’s been around Hutson the least vaunt his defensive game to reporters at Capital One Arena after the victory.
“Lane is unbelievable,” said goaltender Jakub Dobes, who improved to 3-0 through the first three starts of his NHL career.
“He plays really well offensively, obviously, but his defensive game is pretty good too. So, I’m glad he’s on our team.”
It’s a sentiment all Canadiens players naturally share.
And we imagine executives from the 31 other teams are kicking themselves for allowing the 20-year-old to go 62nd overall to Montreal in the 2022 Draft.
At the time, some of them may have wondered how a five-foot-nine string bean like Hutson would one day handle the pressure players like the six-foot-six, 225-pound Protas can apply at this level, but none of them should be questioning it now.
That doesn’t mean Hutson is perfect defensively. He wouldn’t be minus-9 through his first 43 NHL games if he was.
Has Hutson made wrong decisions with the puck in his own zone here and there? Has he occasionally been outmuscled in the corners and in front of his own net? Has he missed coverage from time to time?
The answer is yes on all accounts. Hence the underlying stats paint a less favourable picture of his defensive game than the one you’re seeing on this page.
But the kid wouldn’t be trusted to be on the ice for nearly 23 minutes per game if all he could do was dangle and pass, and the notion he’s a liability without the puck couldn’t be further from true.
What we saw in Friday’s game was example after example of how reliable Hutson actually is off the puck — with the last play he made before Suzuki scored serving as the most glaring one.
It’s the subtle ones you have to pay attention to, to truly appreciate what this player is capable of defensively.
Exactly 30 seconds before breaking up Protas’s pass to Carlson, Hutson made his most subtle play and recaptured the momentum surrendered by Jake Evans’s face-off loss to open overtime. All he did was knife the puck off Carlson’s stick in Montreal’s zone with a perfectly timed stick check.
A little play like that is easy to miss — and even easier to forget as Hutson transitions the puck up the ice and nearly sends Caufield in on a breakaway — but it’s the stuff his defensive game is made of.
Hutson has to be good with his stick to make up for his lack of size, and he does the rest with his brain and feet which appear to ritually operate in perfect harmony. Those assets make him elite at angling players away from the danger zones and enable him to recover quickly when he loses position. The rest comes down to a relentless competitiveness that has been easily identified by anyone who’s ever watched him play.
All these features have the Chicago native in the running for the Calder Trophy, but they also have done a great deal to help the Canadiens turn their season around.
And it wasn’t just a couple of plays Hutson made in overtime that helped make a difference in the win that pushed the Canadiens to 20-18-3 on Friday; it was his entire performance that helped them dominate the Capitals.
It started without the puck, as part of an effort to keep Washington to just 17 shots on net.
The Canadiens spotted the Capitals a couple of power plays and a one-goal lead early, but they gave them almost nothing else before Suzuki’s 42nd point of the season ended it.
Caufield scored his 23rd goal to get the Canadiens on the board in the second period, Josh Anderson scored shorthanded to give them a 2-1 lead, and all of them put their foot through the gas pedal to control the game.
The Canadiens were hard to play against.
“It’s engagement,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis. “It’s engagement that shows how to value the game without the puck and defensively, and it starts way outside your zone … We’re killing plays early. For sure, sometimes, they get in, but we’re doing the job. We’re able to defend and there’s no passengers right now.”
There are leaders in this department, though.
Alex Carrier has (rightly) gotten his due since coming over in the trade from the Nashville Predators in the third week of December. Mike Matheson and Kaiden Guhle have gotten theirs, too, and so has Arber Xhekaj.
The conversation about him almost exclusively still slants towards his offensive ability.
But perhaps a night like this changes that.
It’s not the first one that’s seen Hutson shine defensively, and it’ll be far from the last one.
