Canadian 3 – Golden Knights 4 | The rallying cry

(Las Vegas, Nevada) Let’s be good and face it: it could have been a lot worse. With a 3-0 lead in the second period, and the way they were dominating the game, the Vegas Golden Knights were heading for an all-out massacre.

The Canadian, however, almost played a nasty trick on them. The Knights ended up winning 4-3, not without getting hot.

This defeat, in itself, is not an event. The Knights are the best team in the Western Conference, and the Habs, one of the worst in the East. But, as has often been the case this season, especially before Christmas, Martin St-Louis’ men fought hard until the end.

Good teams are known for finding ways to win. Sometimes it’s very ugly, but if it works, that’s what matters. The bad teams – for example the CH – are in the opposite approach. If a setback is unavoidable, you might as well give it value.

Accepting defeat is counter-intuitive for athletes. Nobody likes to lose, nobody wants to lose. But there are contexts where the defeats will be, despite all the good intentions in the world, numerous.

“Most teams can live with defeat if they play hard,” Nick Suzuki said after the game in Vegas. We didn’t make life easy at the start of the match, we can’t be happy with that. But we scored three goals in the third period against a good team. It’s impressive. »

From a certain point of view, it can be heartbreaking to rejoice in such small accomplishments. On the other, we can only salute those who cling to them and seek to overcome them.

The reality is that the Canadiens still have 19 games to play. It would be far more cynical to just watch the calendar go by than to capture the positive.

Now that all the noise surrounding the trade deadline has died down, there’s only one thing left to do: play the best you can with an eye on the goal of long-term success, and this, even if it is not for tomorrow.

“Now is not the time to relax,” Suzuki warned. No matter what happens, we want to push thinking about next year and the year after. We want to continue building the franchise; continue to improve. »

Workforce Management

Improving, of course, means gradually obtaining more convincing results. But it also means improving the general management of the workforce in order to give it the most optimal conditions possible. That, we guess, falls into the head coach’s court.

Small hints of this process were scattered on Sunday. From the start of the game, Mike Hoffman had disappeared from the first trio, in favor of Rafaël Harvey-Pinard.

Hoffman, since his promotion to the left of Nick Suzuki and Denis Gurianov at the start of the trip west, has been a ghost. Harvey-Pinard, even if he didn’t seem to have developed a warm bond with Jonathan Drouin on the second line, had been one of the most consistent forwards in his camp in recent games.

Gurianov got off to a strong start in his Habs debut a week ago. It quickly unraveled. During the match, in Vegas, he slipped to the third line. Jesse Ylönen did the opposite. And it was he who served a perfect pass to Harvey-Pinard on the Montrealers’ third goal.

Martin St-Louis, whose trends we are beginning to grasp, does not like to talk about his hockey decisions. Why did you replace Hoffman with Harvey-Pinard? “As a coach, you try things,” he said. Does he expect more from Gurianov? “He is getting to know his new team. It wasn’t necessarily his match. We hadn’t scored a goal yet, it was time to change things up a bit. »

Only Ylönen was entitled to good words. “He played a good game, he deserved his chance, and it gave us a spark,” St-Louis said of him.

We have often talked about the experiments that are being carried out this season. We can believe that over the next few weeks, they will continue, but by refining the decision-making in light of the findings that have been made. Players like Hoffman or Drouin or Josh Anderson don’t have many surprises to offer at this point. For Harvey-Pinard and Ylönen, even Alex Belzile, it’s different. The pat on the back from their coach is a sign that they are heading in the right direction.

St-Louis, again: “I always say that the coach must convince his players to play in a certain way. When I look at our third period, I think it helps our staff a lot to sell” the concepts and the team system.

Not giving up “must be part of our DNA. No matter what happens, we will continue to push,” added David Savard. “We have proven that we are capable of competing when we are on the same wavelength. In other words, no one can be satisfied with doing their own thing.

At the beginning of the end of the season, it looks like a rallying cry. It’s up to the players to show they’ve heard it.

Rising

Rafael Harvey-Pinard

Not only did he score, but we notice him at practically every one of his appearances. It’s no real surprise, but playing with Nick Suzuki serves him better than with Jonathan Drouin.

Falling

Denis Gurianov

The honeymoon, if there was one, was not long. In the second period, he lost his position on the first line, and his ice time of 13:34 was his lowest in four games with CH. The talent is obvious. The commitment? Less.

The number of the game

58

The two teams exchanged three goals in the space of 58 seconds in the third period – that of Ivan Barbashev, of the Knights, and those of Alex Belzile and Rafaël Harvey-Pinard. To calm his players, Bruce Cassidy, head coach of the premises, asked for a time out. It served him well.

In details

A hasty move

With his girlfriend and their dog, Frédéric Allard was to fly to Montreal on Sunday morning to join the Laval Rocket. The Quebec defender was acquired on Friday by the CH. However, on Saturday afternoon, Allard received a call asking him to leave for Vegas in order to “probably” face the Golden Knights. He was then busy, with his girlfriend and teammates from the Reign of Ontario, in the American League, to pack everything that contained their apartment for an express move. So he had to give up on his better half and flew to Nevada, where he arrived late in the evening. Sunday, when he arrived at the arena around noon, the coach of the defenders, Stéphane Robidas, explained to him in about fifteen minutes the main lines of the game system of the Habs. And at 3 p.m., the game began. Despite the chaos, the young man believes he has experienced “the best of both worlds”. “I didn’t have time to think,” he said after the game. I was so in the mood to organize everything, I had so many things to think about, that I didn’t think about hockey before arriving. It helped take the stress away. On the ice, Allard did well, firing two shots in 11:31.

An expensive trip

Stories like Frédéric Allard’s are good, but his presence with the team is nonetheless attributable to Kaiden Guhle’s inability to play the game. The latter seemed to hurt his arm or shoulder on the right side, Friday night, in the first period of the clash against the Anaheim Ducks. Martin St-Louis indicated before Sunday’s game not to fear a long absence, but it is nevertheless the second defender to have fallen during this trip, after Justin Barron. Both are injured in the “upper body”, and we expect to know more – or not – about them on Tuesday, since the team is off Monday. As if that weren’t enough, Joel Edmundson also seemed inconvenienced after blocking a shot from William Karlsson late in the second period. He stayed in the game, but played relatively little in the last period, beaten by Jordan Harris, Mike Matheson and David Savard. File to follow, there too.

Quick makes a good impression

In his first start in a Knights uniform, Jonathan Quick left a good impression on his new fans. Despite his disheveled style, he stood up in the first two periods. However, things went wrong in the third, especially on the goal of Alex Belzile, who deceived his vigilance with a shot in the top of the net when the goalkeeper had started to kneel. His coach, however, had good words for him, recalling that he had concluded the meeting with victory. “The first goal [du Canadien], there was a screen, recalled Bruce Cassidy. The second was a good shot. And the third one, it happened quickly in front of him, and it was the defender’s job to step in. There will be adjustments to be made with our defenders, as he moves faster than our other goalkeepers. But overall, I liked his game. »