Coming off their worst period of hockey in six weeks — a sleepy, sloppy start in Utah that immediately put their opponents on the power play and put themselves at a deficit — they began the second by moving their feet to draw three power plays, scored the tying goal and took a 9-0 shot advantage through the first 14-and-a-half minutes of play.
The Canadiens were terrible in that first. So bad that coach Martin St. Louis would’ve been completely justified to have laced into them behind closed doors at intermission.
But after the game Tuesday, he told reporters at Delta Center he didn’t have to do that.
“Because I know they talked about it,” St. Louis said.
He has always said good teams take care of the room and enable their coaches to just worry about managing the bench. If there were any doubts remaining the Canadiens were turning themselves into that type of team, they were gone by the end of that second period.
The Canadiens were first to the puck throughout those middle 20 minutes. When they got to it, they managed it well from blue line to blue line and prioritized getting it deep into the Utah Hockey Club’s zone. And from there, they forechecked tenaciously and came in waves to take over a game they appeared destined to give away by doing the opposite through the first 20 minutes.
-
NHL on Sportsnet
Livestream Hockey Night in Canada, Scotiabank Wednesday Night Hockey, the Oilers, Flames, Canucks, out-of-market matchups, the Stanley Cup Playoffs and the NHL Draft.
To see them start the second looking exactly like the team that came into this game with a 12-5-1 record over their last 18 games told you everything needed to know about how firmly entrenched their identity has become.
Were the Canadiens able to stick with it all the way through to the end of the game? Not entirely, but certainly enough to secure a 5-3 win to keep pace in the Eastern Conference playoff race.
What had to be particularly gratifying to St. Louis was watching the individuals who initially caused damage to the Canadiens’ chances redeem themselves.
Mike Matheson followed Michael Pezzetta to the penalty box to give Utah an early five-on-three advantage they scored on to make it 1-0, but he got that one back for the Canadiens with an incredible individual effort a little over one minute later.
Patrik Laine and Kirby Dach took needless penalties to steal any momentum Matheson’s goal gave the Canadiens, and that put the team down 2-1 going to first intermission.
But those two combined to score three of the four goals the Canadiens had over the final 40 minutes of play.
The other guys took care of the rest.
The winning goal belonged to Cole Caufield, whose 24th of the season came off a perfect pass from Lane Hutson.
It was the 20-year-old’s third assist of the game.
Hutson’s first one in this 43rd contest of the season made him the sixth-fastest rookie defenceman to record 30 helpers in an NHL season.
But this win didn’t belong just to Hutson, or Caufield, or Dach, or Laine, or Matheson. It wasn’t Samuel Montembeault’s, even if he saved the Canadiens’ bacon with 12 stops in the first and 10 more before the game ended. It was earned as a team, just like all the other ones before it between Dec. 2 and now.
Prior to that date, the Canadiens couldn’t find a way to do that with any consistency. They were a team searching for an identity, a team seemingly incapable of self-correcting, a team stubbornly clinging to a belief it could play fast and loose with the lead, and a team that ritually abandoned its system and forced plays in unsuccessful bids to close deficits.
They took penalties. Lots and lots of them. And Tuesday’s game was a reminder — even in the third, when Brendan Gallagher and Juraj Slafkovsky each took one — that there’s still one key area of the game for them to clean up.
But quickly returning to their blueprint mitigated that problem against Utah, and there’s reason to believe sticking with it from here to the end of the season will continue to propel this team forward.
“We have a lot of confidence that if we play the right way,” said Matheson, “there’s no team we can’t face and have success against.”
It wasn’t the worst thing for the Canadiens be reminded over the first 20 minutes of Tuesday’s game that playing the wrong way gives them no chance of success against anyone — especially ahead of traveling to play the Stars in Dallas on Thursday before returning to the Bell Centre for back-to-back games against the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Rangers.
That they turned that reminder into redemption over the final 40 minutes is a sign of where they’re heading as a team.
