Martin St-Louis wanted to attack things in order during camp and the Montreal Canadiens players finally spent some time refining their power play game, Monday morning, two days before the start of the regular season.
St. Louis admitted during camp that he hoped to see work on special teams help his group win more games this season. Now solely responsible for the power play, following the transfer of Alex Burrows to a role on the development team, St-Louis changed the plan to a five-man attack this summer.
His players have not had much time so far to try to apply these changes in a match situation, while most of the members of the first wave have only participated in two of the Habs’ six preparatory matches.
That doesn’t entirely excuse the Canadian’s 0-for-30 performance on the power play during the preparatory schedule. However, St-Louis does not take a dim view of the troubles of his team so far in this phase of the game.
“In a way, I’m almost happy we didn’t show the other teams anything! It’s positive,” exclaimed St-Louis on Monday afternoon.
“And if our power play had worked at 30%, we would say that it had success against American League caliber players,” added St-Louis.
The Quebecer nevertheless admitted that he would perhaps have hoped to have more time to work on the power play.
Unsurprisingly, the first wave consisted of Mike Matheson, Cole Caufield, Nick Suzuki, Kirby Dach and Juraj Slafkovsky on Monday. The second wave lost an important element in Patrik Laine, sidelined for two to three months due to a sprained left knee. It was made up of Lane Hutson, Joel Armia, Brendan Gallagher, Alex Barré-Boulet and Alex Newhook.
“Lane is dynamic up top. “Gally” is in the center. “Army” can throw and is smart. Barré-Boulet can make plays. Newhook has speed and can throw too, St-Louis listed when looking back at the players playing in the second unit. There are elements that we like, and it’s seeing what happens when you put it all together. »
“We will continue to work on concepts with them. It will take as long as it takes, but they all bring something,” he added.
Players like Josh Anderson, Emil Heineman and Oliver Kapanen are also waiting for their chance to assert themselves in this phase of the game, if ever St-Louis is dissatisfied with the performance of the units in place for the start of the season.