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MONTREAL — Let’s talk about intentions, which were in the right place for the Montreal Canadiens at the Bell Centre on Monday night.
Intentions matter, especially when assessing results.
Take Lane Hutson, for example. Him finishing minus-4 against the Pittsburgh Penguins is a bad result despite some very good intentions.
The defenceman did his job well on goals Lars Eller and Rickard Rakell scored to put the Penguins up 2-0, and he was doing much of what the Canadiens wanted him to on plays that led to Pittsburgh’s last two goals.
Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis will keep that in perspective when he reviews the tape.
He said several times after the game that he’ll be studying it closely before judging how and why his team turned a 3-2 lead into a 6-3 loss. And once he goes through that process, he won’t be upset about Hutson’s nor his team’s intentions.
What St. Louis won’t like, however, is the lack of attention to detail from the Canadiens and some curious decision making, which led to the same type of self-inflicted wounds they suffered frequently on their way to a 28th-place finish in the standings last season.
He won’t like that Josh Anderson had a chance to clear the puck out of his own end on Rakell’s goal and instead chose to go backwards with it while the Penguins’ press was on. He won’t like that Kevin Hayes was left all alone in front of Samuel Montembeault for Pittsburgh’s goal to make it 4-3 with 12:13 to play in the third period. And the fifth Penguins goal, which St. Louis admitted “really hurt,” came on a play that saw three Canadiens make the wrong decisions despite having good intentions.
He won’t be alone in emphasizing the urgency to clean things up so that good intentions lead to better results.
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Good teams learn from their mistakes quickly, and the Canadiens have every intention of being a good team this season.
“We talked about being in the mix here, being in meaningful games, and (the self-inflicted wounds are) something we’ve gotta fix,” said Kaiden Guhle. “We know that. I’m sure we’ll hear about that.”
This is a game of details, and the Canadiens can’t let them slip the way they did against the Penguins. No matter how good their intentions were.
Hutson had great ones, rushing deep into the zone, trying to set up a scoring a scoring chance for Nick Suzuki in front of Pittsburgh’s net with the team down by a goal and time ticking down.
But he got jammed behind the play and tried to force the puck to an area well-covered by two Penguins defenders when he was probably better off just banking it off the boards behind Tristan Jarry’s net and forcing a battle for a teammate.
While Hutson was caught in deep, Juraj Slafkovsky recognized it was up to him to cover for the 20-year-old defenceman. He, too, had good intentions on this play but made the wrong decision to pinch at the offensive blue line and ended up giving the Penguins a three-on-one rush.
That was the killer on this play, even if Mike Matheson miscalculated his ability to end the rush before it could turn into a tic-tac-toe goal for Kris Letang.
“I think that’s something we’re going to talk about and look at for sure,” said Brendan Gallagher. “We want our D to be aggressive and, as forwards, we’ve got to cover for them and protect them in certain situations. That wasn’t the case tonight, and we got burned.”
“Those couple of mistakes cost us,” Slafkovsky said. “We just have to look at them so we don’t do it again.”
Montembeault already rewatched the mistake he made on Eller’s second goal and blamed himself for it.
That one tied the game 3-3 with 3:37 to play in a period St. Louis (correctly) qualified as Montreal’s best of the 12 they’ve played so far this season.
What the Canadiens did in that middle frame, minus the second it took for Eller to beat Montembeault over the glove, is the stuff they need to replicate over 60 minutes so their good intentions can be rewarded more often.
The Canadiens were connected, they were working in tandem with each other, properly balanced on the ice, using their speed to their advantage and, most importantly, keeping it simple.
Efficiency — and a couple of goals — was the product.
“I think it was just similar to that Ottawa game (a 4-1 win for the Canadiens over the Senators on Saturday night),” Guhle said. “All the clichés — pucks deep, shots from the point, keeping the puck moving in the o-zone … letting the puck do the work.”
The defenceman, who scored his first of the season in the first period, also hit on what happened when the Canadiens strayed from what they were doing so well in the second.
“Obviously, this is the NHL, and we have a lot of skilled players, and they want to make plays, and there’s time for that,” he said.
We’ll finish that thought: The time is probably not when the team’s execution is off at the start of the game and the Penguins are already leading 1-0.
It’s also not when the Canadiens are down by a goal, even if there are only eight minutes remaining in the third period.
The calculations that must be made in that situation must be more precise, no matter how good the intentions.
That’s what the Canadiens will be talking about when they return to the ice Wednesday, following Tuesday’s day off.
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