All Canadiens fans right now must be thanking Carey Price for his phenomenal play in 2014-15, because without him, their team wouldn’t be leading the Eastern Conference with a 42-18-7 record. Their offence has been uncharacteristically weak as of late and was never as potent as that of the Tampa Bay Lightning or New York Islanders all season long. In fact, the Habs sit 22nd it in terms of goals per game at a 2.55 clip. Compare that to The Lightning(1st, 3.25 G/PG) or Islanders (3rd, 3.07 G/PG), who are potential playoff opponents. The Canadiens offensive struggles need to be an issue that the coaching staff is putting as top priority on the list of concerns to fix before the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Let’s get this straight first right off the bat; the Habs are not built to be a high-scoring team. That’s what happens when P.K. Subban is raking in $9 million and Andrei Markov is bringing home $5.75 million. A defensively-structured team also stems from the fact that no real offensive threat can be found outside of Max Pacioretty, who has scored 31 goals while three other players- Tomas Plekanec, Alex Galchenyuk and Brendan Gallagher– sit at 19 goals each. Subban is the next highest-scoring player with 12 goals and also leads the team in assists with 37, 7 ahead of the number one center David Desharnais. Yes, it’s clear that this team isn’t very offense-oriented.
That in no means gives them an excuse to sit in that 22nd spot in terms of league-scoring with 15 games to go. 10th to 15th range is acceptable for a team so high in the standings. The team might have home-ice advantage throughout the conference playoffs, but they can’t start the post-season dance with the least goals scored out of all the 16 teams remaining.
Since the start of March, after five games, four of which were in the wild Western Conference, the team managed to score six goals-including an empty netter against the Arizona Coyotes, a game in which they scored only one goal past struggling goaltender Mike Smith. They were shutout against San Jose and against Tampa when they returned home on Tuesday night but they did score three goals in a 4-3 shootout loss against the Kings last Thursday.
Price has been standing on his head in order to keep his team in games and if Montreal wants to make another long playoff run like last season before the 27-year old net-minder went down, they can’t be relying on their goalie to bail them out so late in the season and they certainly cannot rely solely on Price to push them through four best-of-seven series in order to win the Stanley Cup. Price has been playing a lot of hockey and he’s been stopping a ton of vulcanized rubber, but the Canadiens’ offensive struggles aren’t helping him out one bit. If they have a higher-scoring attack, at least for the final fifteen games, Price would be well rested with his dancing shoes on tight come time for the spring dance.
The Habs’ scoring slump can easily be contributed to the coaching staff lead by Michel Therrien. He always has an impulse to just change lines in the middle of games, a measure used by many coaches to change things up if a player or the whole team is struggling to score goals. However, when it happens as much as it does on a game-to-game basis, it constantly confuses fans and players alike. At this point, it’s just 12 Canadiens forwards sitting on the bench, waiting for their name to be called. Sometimes, it looks more like a shiny game. Anyone go out and play, seems to be the motto. The only constant for the forwards is the duo of Pacioretty and Desharnais. Usually paired with Brendan Gallagher, it was Galchenyuk who got to play with them for three shifts before Gallagher was sent back to the top line on Tuesday night. Top nine forward Dale Weise may sometimes make the appearance on the number one trio.
The bottom six forwards of Brian Flynn, Torrey Mitchell, Jacob De La Rose, Brandon Prust, Lars Eller and Devante Smith-Pelly have constantly been shuffled, which has created problems as only Prust and Eller were playing for the Montreal Canadiens two months ago. Chemistry is essential for any professional sports team, any level for that matter, and Therrien is like an antibiotic inhibiting bacterial growth, he’s an antibonding coach inhibiting friendship and bonding between the players in terms of playing together on the ice.
Anyone who has ever played sports knows the value of comradery and it’s even more important when three men have to be together for sixty minutes on any given night, skating hard and trying to score goals for 15 minutes and sitting on the bench together for the other 45.
As a hockey player myself, even in the most nonchalant league, it’s frustrating to have a line broken up and being forced to play with other people. They are practically strangers to you on the ice, even though you enjoy spending time with them in the locker room.
Maybe that’s what Therrien doesn’t want out there, teammates to be strangers. He wants to create a “Tinder-like” atmosphere where everyone gets to know everyone. But the problem is that it’s not working on the scoreboard.
If one can blame anyone for the Canadiens offensive struggles, coach Therrien is the culprit. It’s time for him to have a bit more faith in his forwards and let them bond together, at least for a game and a practice, before he breaks them up. It’s looking like the Kim Kardashian-Kris Humphries marriage, nothing lasts more than 72 minutes. The coaching staff will hope to find the right combination before the playoffs, or else Price will have to be bailing his team out more often than not in the spring as the Canadiens will look to challenge for Stanley Cup #25.
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