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Martin St-Louis said all the right things about Kirby Dach’s injury in his pregame presser, he called it very bad luck and a huge loss, but he added that his team needed to keep moving forward. He probably believed those things as well and hoped and preyed that his young team was ready to do just that, but unfortunately, it wasn’t so. His team looked shellshocked out there, the gravity of Dach’s injury might only have been confirmed after the game, but there is little doubt that his teammates knew how severe it was and that they weren’t done grieving his loss.
The Canadiens entered the game without a single unaltered line, Dach’s injury moved Newhook to centre, which meant that Pearson moved to the second line, Anderson to the third, Harvey-Pinard to the first and Pezzetta found a chair on the fourth unit. That’s a lot of changes and those were lines that didn’t even get a single practice playing together.
Remember, the Canadiens were off on Sunday, they practiced on Monday but only worked on special units (not that it showed tonight, although to be fair Dach was also a big part of the power play) and today, the morning skate was optional. Is it that much of a shock then that the team looked disorganized and that there was a complete lack of cohesion? Perhaps, since St-Louis wants his team to play off the way they read the game, he thought that they could do without practicing as lines, but whichever system or lack of you use, there’s something to be said about familiarity and good old chemistry.
What this doesn’t account for however is the fact the Canadiens took 10 minor penalties and no, that’s not a typo. A large amount of the said penalties was taken as far as can be from the Habs’ net and no coach likes offensive zone penalties, especially those that are inexcusable ones. Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of the first fighting penalty Mike Pezzetta took less than two minutes after Pearson had gotten the Habs on the board. It felt like momentum was shifting and Montreal did not need a stoppage in play at that moment. Yes, I know, that’s the kind of job that falls to the rugged winger, but you need to learn to pick your moments.
Luckily for the young Canadiens, their coach is a patient man and when he was asked about the bad interference penalty Juraj Slafkovsky took in the second frame to negate his team’s power play when they still had a chance, although admittedly a slim one, to get back in this contest, he didn’t throw him under the bus. He simply stated that he’s young and he’ll learn from that, he’s so strong that when he hits a stick it flies, and those penalties aren’t always called but they were tonight. He also added that he’s made that play himself in the past and had he chosen to sit Slafkovsky down as a punishment, he would have had to glue half the team to the bench considering how many penalties they are taking. Words of wisdom once again by the fairly green coach.
While the Canadiens don’t really care about results this season, even though St-Louis said he was proud of his team’s start to the season fetching 3 points out of the possible 4 they had battled for, they still care about the way those results are obtained or, in some cases, suffered. Montreal entered this 5-2 loss as the second most penalized team and after tonight, it’s first. What we have there is a pattern and one that the coach will need to address, the sooner the better.
If all the penalty shenanigans weren’t bad enough, Kaiden Guhle left the game towards the end of the second frame, and he didn’t return for the third. After the defeat, the team announced that he had sustained an upper body injury, and he was still being evaluated. This came shortly after they had confirmed that Dach would be out for the season after suffering both an ACL and a MCL tear which would require surgery, quite the double whammy. Sportsnet’s Eric Engels’ information on Monday night was bang on much to everyone’s dismay.
Now, there are apparently some rumblings that Kaiden Guhle has suffered a broken wrist and that he could be out for eight weeks. If this turns out to be true, it would be yet another colossal loss for the team. At least there’s a silver lining if you want to see it, and you really have to want to see it, it’s not yet another knee issue for Guhle.
For the last two seasons, the Canadiens held the unenviable title of man game lost champions, and they took some steps to address that this Summer by giving their medical staff a complete makeover. Try as you may though, there is one thing that you simply cannot address pure dumb luck (or lack of). These two injuries aren’t on the Canadiens’ medical staff, they haven’t even had the chance to treat and protect those players from themselves yet.
It's scary to even type it, but am I the only one who remembers they say bad things come in three? Could this be a third record breaking year in-a-row injury wise for the Habs? Should we also expect a trifecta of serious injuries? Who will draw the short straw in the Canadiens’ next outing on Saturday?
Even scarier is the fact that both Dach and Guhle are big pieces in the Canadiens’ reconstruction and either they both have the absolute worst luck or they are severely injury prone. I mentioned yesterday that sources close to the Hawks said last season that they had moved on from Dach because of health concerns and not because they had given up on him… It happens, that’s the reason Serge Savard gave in his book for trading Chris Chelios, the Canadiens’ medical staff had told him the blueliner had bad knees and his career wouldn’t last very long. They could not have been more wrong since the star defenseman played for 21 seasons on top of the seven he had spent patrolling the Canadiens blue line. Perhaps in Dach’s case, the Hawks staff was right.
In five NHL seasons, Dach has played a grand total of 212 games, an average of 42 games per season. Given how important centers are in the NHL, you cannot afford to only have one of your top six centers for half the season, not if you want to be a contender in any case. As for Guhle, he has played 92 hockey games since the 2021 Spring. There’s a major cause for concern in both these cases. For now, we’ll wait for the official verdict on Guhle, but boy what started out like a fun and promising season for fans is fast turning into a cruel nightmare.
For Marc-André Fleury though, this game was anything but a bad dream. In what could very well have been his last game at the Bell Centre, after all, he’s 38 and time waits for no man, he played well and was named the first star. He was cheered by everyone remaining in the arena whichever team they rooted for and long after the game had ended, he was in the stands talking with his friends and family as he got one step closer to catching up to Patrick Roy in the career wins standings. Congratulations MAF, that’s no easy feat (sorry but for me there is only one Flower and he has already left this world) and I would have cheered for you too had I been in the building tonight.
It’s always a treat when the Flower plays in Montreal. â¤ï¸ #NHLFaceOff
— NHL (@NHL) October 18, 2023
(📸: @mnwild) pic.twitter.com/aAWFuz3IgV