MONTREAL — New season, elevated expectations.
The Montreal Canadiens earned them by unexpectedly by making the Stanley Cup Playoffs last spring. Now, it’s time to see if they can meet them.
It’s one thing to go into a season aiming to prove everyone wrong, playing loose and pressure-free. It’s another thing entirely to go into one aiming to prove people right.
Gauging the market, it’s become apparent that people around Montreal see the Canadiens as a team on the rise, a team with a promising core that’s matured and gelled together — and been bolstered by the additions of Noah Dobson, Zachary Bolduc and Ivan Demidov — and with that comes the type of pressure this group hasn’t yet faced.
How will the Canadiens handle being expected to make the playoffs? That’s what we’re going to find out over the next 82 games.
The evaluation begins as soon as next week, though, when training camp opens and battles for position and hierarchy start taking shape.
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The Canadiens didn’t quite ace the exercise last season and got off to the worst start of any team in the league.
But let’s see if they can take off on the same foot they landed on when we last saw them.
Salary Cap Space: $4.56 million
Head coach: Martin St. Louis
Assistant coaches: Stephane Robidas, Trevor Letowski
Key new additions: Noah Dobson, Zachary Bolduc, Joe Veleno, Samuel Blais, Kaapo Kahkonen
WHAT WE’LL LEARN DURING PRE-SEASON
First, we’ll find out if last fall’s lessons hit hard enough.
The Canadiens had a training camp that didn’t exactly go as planned. It seemed like they felt they’d just naturally take the next step in their progression without putting in the extra effort that would enable them to. And major injuries to Patrik Laine and David Reinbacher seemingly disrupting a proper ramp up to the regular season.
The coaching staff opted for caution after those two went out in the same pre-season game, ultimately not icing their full lineup in a single other exhibition game before losing all but four of 11 games in October and dropping five of their first seven games in November.
Replicating that type of record this time around would be a recipe for complete disaster.
That must be avoided with every action the Canadiens take in September, in the lead up to opening night, in Toronto, on Oct. 8. That means running an uber-competitive training camp, tightening the systems — and the screws, when mistakes are made — in every practice, and building up chemistry with every pre-season game.
The Canadiens thought they were doing that before last season. But they must really do it before this one, because a cold start will be much harder to erase with a schedule that’s far more compressed in this upcoming Olympic year.
All eyes will be focused here, and with good reason.
The Canadiens’ second line was a black hole last season, but returns to health by Kirby Dach and Laine, the off-season acquisition of Bolduc, the full-time inclusion of Demidov, and young players Joshua Roy and Oliver Kapanen pushing to prove they have the talent to play up the lineup gives coach Martin St. Louis a level of flexibility he didn’t have back then.
What he should be able to do with it is stimulate healthy competition.
The rest is up to the players.
Will Dach be able to drive this line after missing 105 of the last 164 games he was eligible to play over the last two seasons? Or will back-to-back, season-shortening injuries to his right knee render that task too tall for him out of the gate?
Will Laine be able to adjust his game to own his place as the expected finisher on a line with Dach and Demidov? Or will he continue to feed the opposition’s transition game with individual plays that freeze out his linemates and limit his ice-time?
Will any of Bolduc, Roy or Kapanen step up and push Dach or Laine down?
So many questions, but answers should become clearer over the next three weeks or so.
There might not be space for him on the opening night roster, but there’s no time like the present for Reinbacher to prove himself worthy of his place in the NHL.
There was reason to believe the fifth-overall pick in 2023 would take it last September, before he was stopped in his tracks by a serious knee injury that limited him to just 23 AHL games (regular season and post-season combined), and hampered him all the way through May. Now he’s healthy and staring down another great opportunity.
Never mind that Reinbacher is trying to squeeze his way into a more mature — and more complete — defence corps. The sooner he proves he deserves to be a part of it, the sooner he will actually be a part of it.
It’s what the Canadiens want from a player who they expect will be a core piece of the team for years to come, and it’s what makes Reinbacher one of the focal points of this camp.
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Who’s getting a penalty-kill assignment?
With Christian Dvorak, Joel Armia and David Savard all removed from what proved to be the ninth-best penalty kill in the league last season, jobs are open.
Figure Alex Newhook fills one up front, and that still leaves one for another forward not named Nick Suzuki.
Sure, the captain will kill.
But ideally, Suzuki would not play a regular penalty-killing shift so that his energy can be conserved for team-leading responsibilities at five-on-five and on the power play.
Meanwhile, the most compelling battle for penalty-killing time will be between Arber Xhekaj and Jayden Struble. You can put Mike Matheson, Kaiden Guhle and Alex Carrier down for full-time duty now that Savard has retired, but whichever one of Xhekaj or Struble proves most effective as a fill-in likely gets a jump on the other to be the team’s sixth defenceman.
Samuel Montembeault is the undisputed starter, and the lead up to the regular season will determine who’s pushing him from behind.
Jakub Dobes offered many reasons to believe he’s ready for the full-time job. But at 24 years old, and with just 17 games (regular season and post-season combined) of NHL experience, he’s far from having cemented his place.
Dobes is also eligible to be sent to the Laval Rocket without needing to pass through waivers.
Kaapo Kahkonen, who’s 29 and has 140 games of NHL experience, isn’t. Chances are he’d slip through waivers with a $1.15-million salary, but we don’t think he’ll be placed on them if he has a better camp than Dobes.
Florian Xhekaj steals a spot on the Canadiens out of camp.
It’s a long shot, even if Xhekaj projects to be an NHLer. He has only one year of professional experience and was expected to be more of a long-term project.
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