Georges Laraque, the former Canadiens winger turned radio commentator, had an interesting bit of news this week.
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He reported that a friend in Toronto spotted Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes and head coach Martin St. Louis meeting Gerard Gallant in a café.
There was an implication that Montreal was thinking of adding Gallant, a former Canadiens assistant who has been a head coach with four NHL teams, to its coaching staff or, at the very least, Hughes and St. Louis were picking his brains for insight into what’s wrong with the Canadiens.
The rumour died when Hughes and Gallant both denied meeting. And, while misrepresenting the truth — that’s a polite term for lying — is not unknown in the world of sport, I suspect Gallant is content to enjoy life with the $5 million remaining on his contract with the New York Rangers.
But the rumour raises the question: Why haven’t the Canadiens bolstered the most inexperienced coaching staff in the NHL? Much was made of St. Louis’s jump from a midget team in Connecticut, but assistants Trevor Letowski and Stéphane Robidas also had zero NHL coaching experience before joining the Canadiens.
There was an opening created when Alex Burrows transferred to a development role, but St. Louis elected not to replace him. The Canadiens did hire Roger Grillo as a coaching consultant. He is a hockey lifer, but has zero experience in any role at the professional level.
There are 12 former head coaches currently serving as assistant coaches and three of them are paired with a first-time NHL head coach.
Jacques Martin, who was the head coach in Montreal and three other cities, is helping Drew Bannister in St. Louis; Kirk Muller is paired with Spencer Carbery in Washington and Derek King is working with Luke Richardson in Chicago.
A veteran coach might be able to add some perspective to the Canadiens’ win in Buffalo on Monday before the team fell 3-0 in Minnesota on Thursday night.
There were some things to like about the win.
Sniper Cole Caufield scored his 11th and 12th goals of the season. Nick Suzuki also scored twice and added two assists to stand at a better than point-a-game pace. Josh Anderson showed he can finish, although you wish a guy with a $5.5-million cap hit would be on a pace to score more than 15 goals.
Throw in a goal by rookie Emil Heineman and an empty-netter by Christian Dvorak, who is on pace to deliver 10 goals for his $4.45-million cap hit, and you have the Canadiens’ highest-scoring game of the season.
The bad news is that the Canadiens needed all those goals to ensure a 7-5 victory in the Veterans Day matinée because Montreal continues to have the worst defence in the league.
The Canadiens are the only team in the NHL allowing more than four goals a game and they have a goal differential of minus-24, which explains why they are the clubhouse leader in the Porter Martone sweepstakes.
(If you haven’t been keeping up with the prospects for the 2025 NHL draft, Martone has moved ahead of Boston College’s James Hagens in some rankings. Martone has 16 goals and 16 assists in 16 games for the Brampton Steelheads of the OHL. Did we mention that he’s 6-foot-3 and 208 pounds and plays right wing?)
Getting back to the Montreal defence, the Buffalo game highlighted an ongoing problem. The Canadiens employ a hybrid defensive system, which sees the players switching between man-to-man coverage and a zone defence, depending on where the puck is.
Given the speed of the game, this seems like a tough ask for a group of young players who are still adjusting to the NHL. Take away Mike Matheson and David Savard and you don’t have a single defenceman who has played the equivalent of two full seasons in the show.
The numbers say the current system isn’t working and it might be time to heed the well-known advice (who many attribute to Albert Einstein, but that has been debunked) that suggests insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Prospects watch: Michael Hage, the 21st overall pick in the 2024 draft, is off to a good start at the University of Michigan with five goals and four assists for the fifth-ranked Wolverines.
But keep your eye on sleeper pick Sam Harris, who was selected in the fifth round (133rd overall) in 2023.
Harris helped top-ranked Denver to an NCAA championship last spring and has the 10-0 Pioneers on top again this season. Harris has nine goals and four assists in nine games. Four of those goals have been on the power play and four of them have been game-winning goals.