When defenceman Kaiden Guhle didn’t make the trip to Long Island with his Montreal Canadiens teammates on Friday, it had to be doubly frustrating for him.
First off, despite missing almost all of training camp after having his appendix removed, Guhle was playing excellent hockey. It was almost as though he didn’t even need training camp.
But secondly, perhaps most importantly, Guhle had spent a large part of his summer avoiding situations like the one he found himself in at the start of the second period Thursday night against the Los Angeles Kings.
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We don’t know if that hit led to the upper-body injury that kept Guhle out of the game Saturday against the New York Islanders, but for someone with a history of head and shoulder issues, it was not a hit Guhle needs to be taking.
A week earlier, Guhle was asked what he tried to improve on over the offseason. While his answer did not directly address the situation against the Kings and that hit by Adrian Kempe because it was not a puck retrieval, it did refer to the potential result of a hit like that.
“I think protecting myself, retrievals,” Guhle said. “It’s something I’ve tried to work on. Obviously injuries have not been good for me and I’ve had a lot of them, so I’m doing whatever I can to protect myself in those areas. Just use my body better. I’m not a small guy by any means, and I felt there were times I looked small out there. So just trying to use my body better and doing that so I don’t get hit so much.”
How do you do that in the offseason?
“Um, just get guys to come hit you and work on getting the puck, getting retrievals,” Guhle said. “I skate with a lot of pro guys and everyone kind of gets that. Everyone has things they want to work on and maybe it’s awkward for certain guys to do that, but I just tell them, come hit me. I want to work on this. Even when I was here in Montreal, it wasn’t a summer skate per se. We were doing battle drills, we were getting ready for camp, so it’s not too hard to get guys to come hit you in skates.”
He said Michael Pezzetta and Juraj Slafkovský were among the guys who were more than willing to oblige him.
Guhle made the right play on that hit by Kempe, which was totally clean. He needed to gain the red line and get the puck deep. But he could have protected himself better. He could have better braced himself for the contact. And no matter how much he tries to work on it in practice, he needs to apply those lessons better in live NHL games.
Because Guhle is far too important to the Canadiens’ chances for success for him not to.
The Evans and Armia pairing remains perfect
Jake Evans led all NHL forwards last season in short-handed ice time and is once again in the lead peloton this season. His value to the Canadiens in this regard is heightened because last season they spent the third-most time short-handed in the league, and this season they are still excelling in that area, sitting with the fifth-most short-handed minutes in the league following Sunday’s games.
On Saturday night alone, Evans played 7:13 with the Canadiens down a man, including the entire four-on-three penalty kill when Kirby Dach was called for high-sticking in overtime. And yet again, Evans was not on the ice for the lone goal the Islanders scored on the power play. That game brought his season’s total for short-handed time on ice up to 20:46, and Evans still has not been on the ice for a goal against in those minutes. His most frequent penalty-killing partner Joel Armia has played fewer minutes at 15:31, but he, too, has not been on the ice for a goal against in those minutes.
Across the NHL, 13 forwards have played at least 15 minutes on the penalty kill at this early stage of the season, and Armia and Evans are the only two who have not been on the ice for a goal against. Only four defencemen fit that same criteria of playing 15 minutes on the penalty kill and not being on the ice for a goal against: K’Andre Miller, Cam York, Nikita Zadorov and Martin Fehérváry.
This is even more remarkable when you consider Evans has only won eight of the 22 short-handed faceoffs he has taken this season.
Caufield has found his sharp-angle touch
Cole Caufield has always liked to shoot from sharp angles and has had a good reason for doing so: he can score from those areas.
His two goals against the Islanders came from less than favourable angles around the left faceoff circle, and they were notable because four of his six goals this season have come from that general area, according to NHL Edge data.
Last season, only three of his 28 goals came from that area to the opposing goaltender’s immediate right.
So, Caufield has already surpassed last season’s total from that specific area of the ice.
Caufield brushed aside a question from La Presse’s Guillaume Lefrançois after the game about whether he feels more comfortable shooting this season because more time has passed since his shoulder surgery two years ago, but it was a legitimate question. Caufield admitted at the end of last season that his shoulder felt better than it had at the start of the season, and studies have shown hockey players can take up to three years to fully recover from labrum surgery.
Caufield is clearly riding a heater right now, shooting at 30 percent, and that will surely go down. But he at least seems aware of that.
“Sometimes there’s good bounces and what I’ve learned is there’s stretches of good and stretches of kind of unlucky hockey,” Caufield told reporters after the Islanders game. “Kind of keeping my head level right now.”
Hutson hears you, but he’s trying not to let it affect him
Pittsburgh Penguins defenceman Kris Letang told reporters after the game against the Canadiens how difficult it’s going to be for Lane Hutson to manage the excitement he is generating from fans at the Bell Centre.
When you pick up a puck behind your own net and the crowd starts to swell, it can be difficult to make the simple play when you know the crowd is clearly expecting more because they are expressing that desire audibly.
As difficult as that might be, Hutson said he’s already learning how to deal with the buzz he’s generating at home.
“I definitely don’t want to try to do too much. We’ve got great players,” Hutson said. “For me, I see the play that I see and I just go with it. I don’t think too much about it. And if that play closes, there’s five to six other plays that I’m looking for.
“It’s definitely cool to hear the crowd, but sometimes the simple play’s the best play.”
Hutson’s desire to make difference-making plays doesn’t come from the crowd’s reaction, he said, but from his own desire to create a reaction somewhere different: in the dressing room. And he wants that reaction to come from his teammates.
“There’s definitely no pressure,” Hutson said. “You just want to leave a good impact for the guys in here. That’s all that matters. You don’t want to do too much because in a league like this that’ll cost you if you get caught.”
Bettman less bullish on the Canadiens getting to Europe
Back in January, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman visited Montreal and made it sound as though the Canadiens playing regular-season games in Europe, perhaps in Paris, was something that could happen in the near future, saying back then that he believed it was “on the horizon.”
When asked how much closer that horizon is during his visit to Montreal last week, Bettman didn’t sound nearly as enthusiastic about it as he did nine months earlier.
“It’s very expensive to take teams to Europe, and the stronger the team, the more expensive it becomes,” Bettman said. “So it would require the right situation for us to take them. We very much would like to take them to Europe, but the economics and the scheduling has to work out for everybody.”
Bettman did not elaborate, but that sounds like it will be difficult for the NHL to match the revenue the Canadiens typically generate at the Bell Centre in Europe, making it difficult for the Canadiens to justify giving up a home date. We’ll see if this goes anywhere, but the commissioner did not make it sound like the Canadiens playing in Europe is still on the horizon.
The case of Roy and the laboratory in Laval
When Joshua Roy was looking for a place to stay this season, he was faced with a dilemma: he didn’t quite know where he would be going to work every day. There was definitely a chance he would be playing for the Canadiens, which would mean regular trips to the practice facility in Brossard on the South Shore of Montreal. But there was a chance he would be playing in Laval, north of the city.
So, he chose to get an apartment right in between, on the island, about a 20-minute drive to Laval and 25 minutes to Brossard.
“I think a lot of hockey players need to make that decision of where to live, you never know what can happen during a season,” Roy said. “If one day I’m able to pick a place that’s really close to Montreal and be sure I’ll stay there, that’s obviously more encouraging. That’s the goal, to be able to do that one day.”
This is where Roy is at, a spot in which he has to live perfectly in between two realities, two stages of his career. And the reality for the Canadiens is they will have numerous players in this position in the coming years. That is where they are in their rebuild.
The Laval Rocket welcomed Filip Mešár, Adam Engström and Owen Beck to the team this year. It was Logan Mailloux, Riley Kidney, Luke Tuch, Florian Xhekaj, Sean Farrell and Roy last year. All of those players either find themselves in a similar spot to Roy or will find themselves there very soon.
This puts Rocket coach Pascal Vincent in a very important position, and while he has experience coaching in the AHL with the Manitoba Moose, he’s never coached this many players with legitimate NHL potential. And that new reality will force Vincent to change the way he coaches.
“For those guys, there’s a lot more one-on-one coaching,” Vincent said. “When you have an older team, yes, you do those one-on-ones, but not with the same frequency. What you’re showing and what you’re coaching is a little bit different. We’re going to do a lot of one-on-ones here and individual, private coaching with those guys. Because we have quite a few guys where we can say, yeah, they have a chance. There’s something there where if they can master that part of the game, they can become … because in order to play in the NHL, you need to bring something that’s different than anybody else.”
Vincent said a lot of the drills the Rocket are doing in practice are specifically designed to help Mailloux — before his call-up to Montreal over the weekend — and Engström improve in the defensive zone. In fact, he had paired them together partly because he felt they could be a good defence pair not only for the Rocket, but for the Canadiens down the road.
As for Roy, there are specific elements of his game he will want to accentuate in Laval because, as Vincent said, you need to bring something different from anybody else.
“I think his ability to move the puck, his composure with the puck. He’s got a creative mind on the ice, he can create offence. I think on the offensive side of the game he can be a real good player,” Vincent said. “I don’t see Josh — and I don’t want to speak for the Montreal Canadiens or the management or Marty (St. Louis) and the coaches — but he seems like a guy that needs to be on an offensive line. So for him to do that, we need to build that confidence here.
“He’s not going to be a fourth-line player, he’s not going to be on the checking line. He has to build that kind of (offensive) game where yes, you can do that, but when you don’t have the puck you need to be reliable. We’re not going to ask you to become a defensive specialist, but you have to be reliable and understand the basics of what needs to be done and the effort that it requires to do that so we can see what you’re really good at more often than not.”
What that means to Roy will be different from what that means to Beck, Tuch or Xhekaj. They have different traits that will need to be reinforced in Laval. But at least the Canadiens appear to have a coach in place there who understands that.
(Top photo of Kaiden Guhle: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
