WASHINGTON — As he stood near centre ice and watched as his Montreal Canadiens players struggled to catch their breath, coach Martin St. Louis paused for a moment.
His players had done several sets of sprints to finish practice, punishment for repeating the same puck management errors that have plagued this team all season and in a 6-3 loss to the Washington Capitals on this same ice surface just over 12 hours earlier.
Those players were already bagged, which was the point. St. Louis paused, skated toward centre ice and barked out, “It’s over.”
He then skated immediately to the bench and left the ice, seemingly wanting to get those players out of his sight as soon as he could. He looked disgusted not so much with them, but what he felt they forced him to do.
End of Canadiens practice was not fun. pic.twitter.com/qVJ5j7FrRg
— Arpon Basu (@ArponBasu) November 1, 2024
St. Louis explained after practice that the bag skate was meant to do two things: break the bad habits that are causing the defensive errors, and change the mindset of the group.
And though he did not explicitly say so, it seemed like the mindset is probably at the top of that two-item list of things he was hoping the bag skate would fix.
“Defensively, we have habits and a mindset that lacks urgency,” St. Louis said. “And what creates that urgency, to me, is always a deadline. You start a season, you have 80-something games, the deadline seems far away. We need to understand the deadline is close. The exam is our next game, so you have to do your homework. You can’t procrastinate and hope to succeed if you lack that urgency.”
The players, on their part, agreed this treatment is the natural byproduct of how they’re playing.
“Where we’re at right now,” captain Nick Suzuki said, “I think it was definitely deserved.”
“There’s different ways to get a message across. That’s the most blunt one,” Brendan Gallagher added. “And there’s not a single guy in here who felt we didn’t deserve it.”
Because a change in mindset, after all, is what this Canadiens season was supposed to be all about, right? That excessive losing was no longer acceptable, that repeated mistakes would no longer be tolerated, that the team was entering a different phase of the rebuild and therefore expectations and performance should all change for the better, right?
Right?
Except what we saw at Canadiens’ practice Friday is very similar to what we saw at Canadiens practice last Friday, the lone difference being that instead of working on Xs and Os system issues in the defensive zone, St. Louis was working on habits and mindset. One’s tangible, one isn’t, but they amount to the same thing, which is a reflection of a team that lacks maturity.
It’s obvious at this point, because a mature team would have taken what it learned last week, seen how it can lead to success by sweeping a back-to-back on the weekend, and run with it. An immature team falls right back into the same traps, which is exactly what the Canadiens have done this week.
And now, for a second Saturday in a row, the Canadiens game on Hockey Night in Canada takes on a disproportionate amount of importance for a game so early in the season. Because for a second Saturday in a row, it seems like the Canadiens are teetering on the brink of a precipice.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations in the last week, and that’s to be expected,” Josh Anderson said. “I hope everybody in here’s received the message and we see a different team in Pittsburgh.”
In a sense, what is happening with the Canadiens could be worse. It could be based on effort, it could be based on players not caring enough. Anderson fought Tom Wilson in the waning moments of a 6-3 loss after he hit Kaiden Guhle, and he did so because he cares. David Savard blocked three consecutive shots on the ensuing Capitals power play, two by Alex Ovechkin, because he cares.
It could also be worse if the rest of the teams in the Atlantic Division weren’t also getting off to very pedestrian starts. The Canadiens, despite it all, are in a four-way tie for fifth in the division (or last in the division, depending on your point of view) and are one point out of fourth.
St. Louis admitted that the teams around the Canadiens also struggling is a bit of a relief, but that is not where his focus lies.
“I can’t look left and right. I have to look inside, (to) what we’re doing,” he said. “And sometimes teams here, teams there will help you, but right now, we need to help ourselves.”
All is not lost for the Canadiens to reach their modest goals this season. And St. Louis has no intention of adjusting those goals based on what he’s seen so far and the fact his team is so young, because they are still attainable goals. They are, quite literally right now, still in the mix for a playoff spot.
But that’s in spite of themselves and not because of anything they have done, and that’s what St. Louis wants to change.
“To me it’s the habits and the mindset. I have to get through that. If we can get through that stage, the other side of that stage is really nice, but we’ve got to go through that stage right now,” he said. “I didn’t know if we were going to go through that stage in game four, game 30, but it’s where we are today.”
And hence, we got the first real bag skate of the Martin St. Louis coaching era Friday. It was a sign the Canadiens are in a different stage, and it is exactly what players like Suzuki and Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovský and Kirby Dach should want. They are sick of losing, but they have not shown they are sick of losing, they are still behaving like a team that thinks losing is acceptable.
“We’re not the team we were two years ago, we’re not in the same stage,” Suzuki said Friday. “There’s a lot more expectations and pressure to perform, and we haven’t been living up to those.”
It is easy to think right now that statement is false, that this is fact the same team as two years ago, and that this team will continue to lose at the same rate it has over that time.
It is easy to think that because the Canadiens have made it easy to think that.
“You have to be responsible with the puck. You have to take care of the puck,” Gallagher said. “And that’s something we need to hold each other accountable to our standard. And if that’s what we expect of each other, I think that’s something we have to internally control.”
Exactly. It shouldn’t take a bag skate to send a message at the NHL level. But a coach shouldn’t also have to bring up the same talking points about puck management for weeks with nothing changing.
A bag skate is a way to send a message to an immature team. And that’s why the Canadiens had a bag skate on Friday.
(Photo: Ryan Remiorz / The Canadian Press via AP)
