BROSSARD, Quebec – Sam Montembeault and Cole Caufield, on the surface, appear to have nothing in common over this first quarter of the Montreal Canadiens season.
It might seem like a nightmare for Montembeault and nothing but unicorns and rainbows for Caufield if you look solely at their numbers.
Except in both cases, they are looking beyond the numbers, in one case to avoid falling too low and getting a distorted view of how he is playing, and in the other to avoid getting too high and, yes, getting a distorted view of how he is playing.
That is where they meet as teammates, even if they are reaching that meeting point from different ends of the perception spectrum.
We’ll begin with Montembeault, who arrived at his locker after practice Wednesday and stood there, waiting for questions.
The first one he got from me was, “How do you think things are going?”
“For me?” he replied. “Or for the team?”
As if there’s a difference?
Montembeault’s performance is the single biggest determining factor of how his team performs, at least from a results standpoint. Last season, Montembeault punched way above his weight. His goals saved above expected — a metric that measures the expected goals a goaltender faces and subtracts his actual goals allowed from that number — was 14th in the NHL, according to Evolving Hockey. To put that in perspective, Sergei Bobrovsky was 13th and Igor Shesterkin was 10th, with each of their numbers falling within a goal of Montembeault’s for the season.
This season, Montembeault is just below even in the same metric and sits 27th in the NHL among starters. Jordan Binnington is 25th, Bobrovsky is 28th, and Shesterkin is third, for perspective.
Basically, Montembeault is not allowing many more goals than he’s expected to allow; he just isn’t stopping as many goals that are expected to go in. He’s essentially breaking even, which is further exposing some of the defensive issues the Canadiens had last season and continue to have this season.
And thus, the answer to Montembeault’s questions — For me? Or for the team? — is both.
“It’s been obviously some ups and downs,” he said. “I’ve had some really good games, some games that were a little harder. You know, like the last two starts, give up four goals both games, but talking to the goalie coach, I think my execution is pretty good, I’m doing a lot of good things.
“Then we make a mistake, give up an odd-man rush, I think maybe I’m not making the big save that we need sometimes. But I don’t think I’ve given up any really bad goals the last couple of games.”
He’s not wrong. The difference is last season, he was making that big save more often. And the reality is, as a team, the Canadiens have the worst five-on-five save percentage in the NHL at .873, and among starters, Montembeault is fifth-worst at .896.
The challenge for Montembeault is looking past those numbers and evaluating his game in the proper context, which is something goalie coach Éric Raymond is helping him with.
“I was thinking a lot after the game in Toronto, obviously, and at practice the next day I talked to Éric and that’s what he told me: not to overthink it, my execution is good, I’m doing a lot of good things,” Montembeault said. “Last game we played better, we’re going to play better, and that’s going to make my job easier. At that point, if I don’t have to make four big saves a game and only have to make one or two, that’s obviously going to be better.
“And at that time, I’m going to have to make them.”
Last season, the Canadiens finished with the ninth-best five-on-five save percentage in the league. It would be easy to point at that dip to last in the league and point the finger at Montembeault. But watching the games, the errors in front of him have been so glaring and so frequent that the dip is probably more due to that than anything Montembeault is doing.
Context is important.
The same goes for Caufield, and much like Montembeault, he is not allowing the numbers to tell him a different story.
Caufield is in a four-way tie atop the NHL leaderboard with 12 goals in 16 games. He’s happy with that, of course, as it puts him on a 60-goal pace for the season. But he knows there are areas of his defensive game that can still improve.
“For me the defensive side of things is simple, but it’s little details you kind of want to get better at,” he said Wednesday. “For me personally, I just don’t want to be noticed in the D-zone, have my guy, do my thing, win a battle, get the puck out. The less time you spend in the D-zone is probably one of your better shifts. It’s as soon as you lose the puck, so more often than not, D-zone is in our O-zone too.”
That’s where Caufield’s game seems to have dipped a little bit from last season. He was excellent last season at getting pucks back in the offensive zone and extending possessions by tracking and intercepting opposing breakouts before they even had a chance to get going. It is something we are seeing less frequently from him this season, and he knows it.
His on-ice expected goal differential at five-on-five is the worst among Canadiens forwards, and his shot attempt differential is second-worst among forwards.
And that defensive step back is something he’s identified as something that’s impacting one of his primary offensive identities: his elite shot volume. Caufield is tied for 71st in the NHL with 41 shots on goal after finishing seventh in the NHL last season with 314, a drop from 3.83 shots on goal per game to 2.56.
A lot of those missing shots came off situations where Caufield got pucks back before they ever left the offensive zone.
“That’s when I feel at my best,” Caufield said. “I feel like my shot total’s where it is, and that’s fine, but you get more chances off of those (forced turnovers) more than anything else. O-zone time’s one thing, but you get more dangerous shots that you want to take. Sometimes I felt like I was shooting from the goal line too much last year, like the corner, it’s not really needed. That’s something you learn as you go, you can hold on to it a little bit more if you feel comfortable with it.
“But for me, I just feel like I’m extending (zone time) as much as I can, not forcing anything. For sure, I’d like to get more shots. I think I could shoot a little bit more, but right now I don’t really want to change anything as long as they keep going in.”
That’s the difference between Caufield and Montembeault. One is getting results, so the resistance to change is easier. The other isn’t, making the resistance to change harder. But in both cases, it is important to prioritize the process over the results, and it appears both are doing that right now from two completely different points of view.
(Top photo of Cole Caufield and Sam Montembeault: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
