Canadiens’ St. Louis made right decision benching Laine, Dach in loss to Ducks

The Montreal Canadiens were trailing 3-2 with just under a minute to go in Sunday’s game when Brendan Gallagher was tapped as the sixth man to join Christian Dvorak, Jake Evans, Juraj Slafkvosky, Mike Matheson and Lane Hutson to pursue the tying goal.

Goaltender Samuel Montembeault had already been on the end of the Canadiens’ bench for over a minute. Patrik Laine had been in the middle of it for over 13.

The elite goal scorer played one 32-second shift in the third period and didn’t see the ice again after it ended. The big Finn, who came into the game with 12 goals in 22 contests with the Canadiens, wasn’t tapped after Alex Killorn gave the Ducks that 3-2 lead in the 12th minute of the frame and he certainly wasn’t going to be tapped with the Canadiens’ net empty and a fifth-straight loss hanging in the balance, and that wasn’t just noteworthy, it was necessary.

Because this season isn’t just about the playoff chase for the Canadiens. What it’s mostly about is creating winning habits and elevating standards, and players that stray from those habits and fall well beneath those standards need to be held to account.

Laine wasn’t the only one who fell well beneath standard and needed to be held to account on Sunday. Linemate Kirby Dach, who bookended a needless penalty at the end of the second period with egregious mistakes on two of Anaheim’s three goals, played just two shifts in the third period, and that was after he, Laine and Alex Newhook were dominated through the first 35 minutes of play.

Four of Newhook’s five shifts in the third came as a fill-in on the Canadiens’ fourth line because, as coach Martin St. Louis said to reporters who were in attendance to watch Newhook’s line flounder through the first half, “It’s not a game where they were helping us at one end or the other.”

That all three players were hurting the Canadiens was something he couldn’t — and shouldn’t — tolerate. Especially not when St. Louis had nine other forwards and six defencemen doing everything they could to help snap their team out of its current funk.

This game started with a strong first period from those 15 players and Montembeault. 

A brilliant play on the penalty kill by Evans and Joel Armia executed right in the middle of it gave the Canadiens a 1-0 lead.

Dvorak fought through traffic to bury a rebound in the last second of a power play to make it 2-0 in the fifteenth minute of play, and Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Slafkovsky helped create offensive momentum by dominating their matchup at five-on-five before the game began to turn in the second period.

The first goal against, scored by Mason MacTavish wasn’t a killer.

The next one, scored 40 seconds later by Frank Vatrano, was. 

And even if it came because Dach made an obvious mistake abandoning his coverage, it started with a less obvious mistake from Laine, who disengaged from his neutral-zone forecheck and stopped pressuring the puck.

That’s not a feature of the Canadiens’ system. St. Louis always says the key to his team’s execution is its forecheck, and this was an unacceptable deviation from the system.

St. Louis put Laine on the ice for one more shift in the second, but he had pretty much seen enough disengagement and deviation before parking him for 19:28 of the third. 

“The effort has to be there,” the coach said, “but the brain has to be there, too.”

It has to be there for everyone on this team for it to win, and you’d hope that point was authoritatively driven home by the punishments St. Louis handed out on Sunday.

He didn’t have to punish anyone from Nov. 15 to Jan. 15 — when the Canadiens were winning regularly with contributions and engagement from all their players. Throughout that run of great play that saw the team put up the seventh-best points percentage in the NHL, he said repeatedly he saw no passengers.

But things have changed too much since then, with the Canadiens losing six of their last nine games and having too many passengers.

“In our good sequence, we found ways to win,” he said. “Now, it’s not like we’re getting dominated, but we’re finding ways to lose. We have to look at it and have a team that’s engaged, connected, and working at both ends of the ice.”

If St. Louis isn’t getting that from certain players, he can’t allow them to get on the ice.

The coach was too lenient through a bad start to the season for the Canadiens, but they aren’t the same team now as they were then.

They raised the standard significantly after that bad start, and players currently falling beneath it need to look themselves in the mirror and reassert themselves.

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