Canadian-Red Wings | Youth again

(Detroit) At his pre-game press briefing on Friday, Derek Lalonde spoke of the Canadiens’ famous “big four” in defense during the 2021 playoffs.

Guillaume Lefrancois
The Press

The Red Wings head coach was then an assistant in Tampa, and saw the quartet of Shea Weber, Ben Chiarot, Jeff Petry and Joel Edmundson up close. “These four defensemen were tough to play against, they played simply, they weren’t flamboyant and they weren’t always supporting the attack,” noted Lalonde.

Here we are only 15 months later and it is with a still very young defense that the Canadiens will face the Red Wings on Friday, in what will be the opening game of the Wings 2022-2023 season.

As a reminder, for those who have forgotten: Weber will no longer play, Chiarot will play Friday’s game, but in uniform with the winged wheel and Petry is in Pittsburgh. The sole survivor of this brigade, Edmundson, remains in the infirmary until further notice.

The Montreal defense is now condemned to stay young for at least two months since the CH announced late Thursday that Michael Matheson will miss eight weeks due to a sprained abdominal muscle.

The pressure will indeed be strong on David Savard, who spent 22 minutes on the ice on Wednesday. But although he may say that he arrived in the best possible shape, the days when he played 27 minutes per game are over. He has reached that figure 10 times, but that was in 2015. Last season he played 25 minutes on three occasions, including once when the team was forced to use Sami Niku and Kale Clague due to the tight squads. thin.

While waiting to see if Kent Hughes will find help, or while waiting for the return of one of the two veterans, this brigade should therefore have four recruits in its ranks, namely Kaiden Guhle, Arber Xhekaj, Jordan Harris and Johnathan Kovacevic.

“Headaches don’t help, hammered Martin St-Louis. This is a challenge for our young group. In English, we say that there is a “silver lining”. It gives young people a chance to have more rehearsals, important rehearsals. It could speed up their development. When Matheson and Eddy come back, we can take another step because the young people will be further in their development. »

On Wednesday, Xhekaj was St. Louis’ least-used fullback at 12:47, while fellow rookie Guhle was the most-used player (22:34). We guess typical rookie ups and downs will cause these stats to vary.

Against Husso

St-Louis will not make any changes to its roster. This means that defender Corey Schueneman, freshly recalled from Laval, will be left out, as will forwards Jonathan Drouin and Michael Pezzetta.

A slight modification observed: it was Sean Monahan who skated in the center of the line with Kirby Dach and Mike Hoffman. In the last game, Dach was officially the center, but it was Monahan who took the majority of the faceoffs.

The Wings will also have big-name players in the stands, forward Filip Zadina, 6^e choice in total in 2018, as well as Pius Suter, author of 36 points last season.

Ville Husso, one of the many newcomers of the summer, will be the starting goalkeeper for Paul Ysebaert’s former team. He will be opposed to Jake Allen.