After an abysmal defensive night in Pittsburgh, the Montreal Canadiens wanted to prove they could tighten up against the Carolina Hurricanes in the home opener.
However, this was the playoffs of last May all over again.
It stayed close on the scoreboard, but it was a crushing night for the confidence as the Canadiens fell to Carolina 6-4.
The Canadiens will play a lot of thrilling hockey this season. They can score. There are many architects on a high scoring team, but the greatest of them is Lane Hutson. He changes the tenor of the game. He creates the pace of the game.
It’s not just the assists for Hutson, though he did count one on the Nick Suzuki goal on a nice pass from Chris Kreider. It’s that he is always in the middle of the action. It’s rare to see a player control so much of the play. On defence, when there is difficulty, he creates space, and skates freely until the pressure is released.
He and Alexandre Carrier make a strong partnership. Even though Carolina was taking their customary shots from everywhere, Hutson and Carrier had an expected goals (xG) share of 79 per cent. That’s a stunningly good number considering how this game played out.
The best line of the night was Phillip Danault centring Alexandre Texier and Zachary Bolduc. At 23 years of age, this might be Bolduc’s breakout season. He has the tools. He simply needed to learn how to play with more purpose.
Under head coach Martin St. Louis, Bolduc is finding his spots on the ice for success. Bolduc scored twice in the opening frame to up his count to three goals in three games.
The Canadiens got a cosmetic goal to create a close finish on Juraj Slafkovsky’s first goal of the season. Kreider was, once again, doing excellent work in front of the net with a deflection. Deflections don’t always go in, but they always cause chaos.
The top brass has wanted to have a more physical footprint this season, and they had it early. On his first shift of the new season, Florian Xhekaj laid out a crushing hit on Nikolaj Ehlers. With both Xhekajs in the lineup and Chris Kreider, the Canadiens are a tougher team to face, and that has value.
The Hurricanes swarming style can make a player look tragically misguided at times. On Carolina’s first goal, Slafkovsky had a chance to clear in front of his own net but chose to stickhandle instead. It was ill-advised leading to a Taylor Hall tally. Slafkovsky had a difficult time all night processing the game at the speed that’s required against Carolina.
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It has not been a stellar start to the season for Jakub Dobes. In the three contests so far, Dobes has a Goals Saved Above Expected of .60 in Toronto, a minus 3.15 in Pittsburgh, and a minus 1.56 in the home opener.
Dobes is swimming a bit right now trying to do a little too much. The foundation of good goaltending is positional intelligence, and preparedness for a rebound. No goalie can rely on terrific reflexes forever. Dobes needs to get back to the stillness that made him the best goalie in the playoffs last season.
It’s not that surprising that there’s a bit of a letdown so far this season. It’s not a black mark by any means, but an observance that Dobes needs to settle himself a bit to resemble the goalie of last year.
By the end of the second period, it was their Eastern Conference Final series all over again. The shots on goal were 29-10. It was Hurricanes domination. The xG share was a massive revelation. The Noah Dobson and Mike Matheson partnership was a catastrophe with a 12 per cent xG share.
Dobson may have had one of the worst nights of his career. He was completely overwhelmed by the fact that it felt like the Hurricanes played with too-many-men on the ice all contest.
Another big disappointment was Kirby Dach. He started the night on the second line replacing the injured Ivan Demidov who is out two to four weeks with a lower-body injury. Dach only played eight minutes. By the end of the game, he played himself right off the trio.
As much as the Canadiens are favoured by some pundits to win the Stanley Cup, this was a night that showed, presently, they aren’t close.
The Canadiens settled on Matheson and Dobson as their number one pairing since Dobson’s arrival from the New York Islanders. At the start of the new campaign, the pairing remains intact, it seems, by presumption.
It is as if the organization feels that the top left side defender is Matheson and the top right-side defender is Dobson and they must be together for team success.
However, the math tells a stunningly different story by looking at the analytics.
The best pairings on the club last season all had Lane Hutson as the left side defender. No one was in Hutson’s realm for success. Analytically, he is, far and away, the best defender on the club.
For the Canadiens to have their best pairings, it isn’t about Hutson. He will succeed with anyone. Hutson had an Expected Goals share with Dobson of 59 per cent. Hutson had a xG share with Carrier of 56. He had an xG of 53 with Kaiden Guhle. He was not paired with Matheson.
The real issue is how to get the most out of Matheson and Dobson, and it, most certainly, is not with each other. Together, they did a team worst xG share of only 45 per cent last season. They are abysmal together.
The best pairing, and most natural, is Hutson and Dobson. It was the best pairing on the team last season, and in Pittsburgh, when thrown together because of the Carrier injury, they did an xG of a 98 per cent share. It’s a phenomenal number and coincided with the Canadiens’ furious comeback.
The issue is finding the best partner for Matheson. Once again, we have a big surprise that could help the balance of the pairings overall, if executed by the coaching staff. The best partner for Matheson last season was Carrier at 50 per cent. It’s the only partner that Matheson was able to hit the 50 per cent plateau with.
The Canadiens are waiting for David Reinbacher. When he arrives, it will be interesting to see with whom he aligns. It has been presumed it will be with Hutson, but the numbers that Hutson and Dobson do together are outstanding, and those two are the true number one pair on the team.
Hutson and Dobson should be together. It then follows that Matheson’s good numbers with Carrier should be executed. The third pair of Reinbacher and Guhle would have a strong left-right balance as well. This would feature all six defenders on their natural sides, and all six defenders slotted to their best performance.
Source: globalnews.ca
