MONTREAL — It was perfectly normal for Martin St. Louis to be about as angry as we’ve seen him after a game this season. After all his talk the previous two days about building his team’s foundation of strong play in the defensive zone, the Canadiens came out to start their game against the Seattle Kraken on Monday having forgotten all of it.
St. Louis was livid, saying his players should have felt embarrassed after the first period, and noting how missed defensive assignments led to Seattle’s first and third goals of the period. The first one was particularly egregious, as the Canadiens failed to pick up their assignments while coming back into their own end in a transition situation for Seattle, a specific point of emphasis for St. Louis of late.
“We had a lot of passengers tonight, and we’re not good enough as a team to have so many passengers,” St. Louis said. “But that’s what we had tonight.”
Again, a normal reaction for St. Louis immediately after a game he hoped would be used to further build a foundation after a strong effort Saturday to snap a seven-game winless slide. He should be disappointed and angry because the game had just ended in a 4-0 loss and his players didn’t even put up a fight in the opening 20 minutes.
But when St. Louis had time to cool down a bit, there was a positive sign for his group, and it came late in that dreadful first period when rookie Juraj Slafkovský had an opportunity to shift the momentum of the game.
Slafkovský found himself on a breakaway with two and a half minutes left in the first and his shot was stopped by Martin Jones relatively easily. It happens. But when St. Louis watches the video of the game Tuesday, what will make him happy about the play is not how it ended, but rather how it began.
That is Slafkovský entering his defensive zone, sorting out what needed to be done and aggressively going at Eeli Tolvanen along the boards, using his big body to seal Tolvanen off from the puck and killing a play. The turnover wound up back on Slafkovský’s stick and he made the correct outlet pass to Christian Dvorak, followed the play up and was rewarded for his strong defense with a Grade-A scoring chance, his first since Dec. 28, according to Natural Stat Trick, and just his second since Dec. 1.
Over the final 40 minutes of a game the Canadiens had already essentially lost, Slafkovský played his best game in weeks. But his reaction to not scoring on that chance was also telling.
After coming off the ice, Slafkovský immediately reached behind him to grab an iPad to see the chance again. He had a chat with assistant coach Trevor Letowski, grabbed the iPad a second time and then calmly put it away.
“Was looking at if there was anything else to do,” Slafkovský said. “I was trying to go five-hole, it didn’t work out. Just looked at what the goalie did so if that happens again, I know how he stands in there.”
St. Louis put Slafkovský’s line back out there the very next shift, and he immediately entered the defensive zone, blocked a Justin Schultz shot before finishing him along the boards and later created another turnover in the defensive zone by killing a play along the wall, only to have Dvorak turn it over in the neutral zone, leading to the line finishing the period hemmed in its own end and leaving the ice to boos from the Bell Center crowd.
The boos were deserved because of how the Canadiens came out so flat and unengaged in what they considered to be an important game. But that overshadowed two important shifts for a player so important to the Canadiens’ future.
“I felt good in my line, I felt we had pretty good chemistry today. Just have to build from that,” Slafkovský said. “Obviously didn’t manage to score, but it’s good to play in this league, the next game is in two days, so we have a next chance. But if we don’t score, we can’t win.”
His next game is actually in three days, but that’s not the point. It’s what he said just before that, which just came out of him, unasked and unprovoked.
It’s good to play in this league.
For someone whose play has been under a microscope all season, with the public discourse becoming louder about whether Slafkovský would be better off playing bigger minutes in the AHL, it was almost as though he was sending a message to that public discourse to quiet down.
Just prior to the opening game of the season, I approached Nick Suzuki and asked about how Slafkovský was fitting in.
Suzuki smiled.
“He’s great in fitting,” he said. “He’s a funny guy.”
But when asked how he felt he looked on the ice, Suzuki got a bit more serious. He thought Slafkovský’s physical gifts would allow him to compete and buy time to develop his game at this level, but he noted how hard he was on himself when things didn’t go as well as he was accustomed to.
Then, after a pause, the Canadiens’ new captain said, “We’ll fix that.”
A little less than three months later, after the game Monday, Suzuki was reminded of that conversation at the tail end of training camp and was asked how that fix-it job was coming along.
“It’s still a work in progress,” Suzuki said. “He’s a first overall pick, a lot of expectations, I know he puts a lot of pressure on himself. Just working with him. I had a talk with him after Saturday, he wants to produce, and just telling him to stick with it, we’re going to have a lot of time together to get better.
“He had a good game tonight, pushing the pace, using his body, that’s the way he needs to play to have success.”
Did you catch that? What makes all of this more important than this one bad game is that message Suzuki sent to Slafkovský after that win against the Blues on Saturday: We’re going to have a lot of time together to get better.
Suzuki wasn’t pleased with his own play in the first period Monday, taking a lot of the blame for how his line with Kirby Dach and Cole Caufield started the game. But all three of those players will have a lot of time to get better together with Slafkovský and Kaiden Guhle and Arber Xhekaj and other young players who haven’t arrived in Montreal yet. Those young players will need to learn lessons like they did Monday night, and there will be others.
It’s part of the process.
Again, it was normal for St. Louis to be angry in the immediate aftermath of a game where he felt so much of what his team had built, the foundation it was laying to come out of an awful losing streak to a better team, was lost. That Montreal took a step back.
But the Canadiens’ entire amateur scouting staff was in the building Monday, along with the entire management team as they held three days of organizational scouting meetings this week. These are the people who made the decision to draft Slafkovský No. 1 in July, the people tasked with laying the foundation for the organization, which is a far different task than the foundation St. Louis is trying to build with how this specific version of this team plays the game.
And in terms of an organizational foundation, nights like this have value because players like Slafkovský can continue taking steps towards being a difference-maker. Had Slafkovský scored on that first-period breakaway, it could have given his team some life, a bit of momentum after sleepwalking through the first 17 minutes of the period. He knows that, which is why he was so disappointed and immediately reached for that iPad when he got back to the bench.
“I’m still learning,” Slafkovský said. “I felt good, we had a couple of chances on our line. But if you don’t score, it’s probably worth nothing.”
He’s wrong.
Perhaps for this one night, it was worth nothing, but in the grand scheme of things, it has a lot of value.
(Photo of Juraj Slafkovský and Justin Schultz: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
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