Barron named first star in win over Jets, among several young Canadiens learning to play free

MONTREAL — When the puck came to Justin Barron, he knew exactly what to do with it.

With two strides towards the middle of the ice and a quick forehand-backhand-forehand move, he snapped a bullet pass across the offensive zone and watched Evgenii Dadonov one-time it into the net to tie Tuesday’s game 1-1.

It was Barron’s first point of the season, collected on a confident play made against big brother Morgan’s Winnipeg Jets, with his parents and several friends from his hometown of Halifax in attendance.

His second came 1:42 later after he made a simple puck retrieval in his own end and got the puck up the boards to Kirby Dach, who then brought it up ice and took a hit to send Mike Hoffman in unmarked for Hoffman’s eighth goal of the season.

By the game’s end, Barron was celebrating a 4-1 Canadiens win and a nomination as the first star.

Was he excited about the opportunity to play? “Of course,” he said on Tuesday morning.

But he also said he was no more excited for this game than he was the other seven games he had played for the Canadiens this season.

What was different about this one, aside from it being against his brother and in front of his parents, was it had come after a couple of good performances, with some confidence built and the pressure beginning to release.

Barron had a lot of it on him in training camp and didn’t handle it as well as he’d have liked. With several spots open, particularly on the right side of the Canadiens’ defence, the 21-year-old was looking at a golden opportunity to start the season in Montreal but couldn’t seem to get out of his own way before being sent down to the American Hockey League.

Barron was recalled to the Canadiens on Dec. 27, played nervously through his first four games — the team going through its worst stretch of the season didn’t help him find his rhythm — and then he was scratched for three before being reinserted in a win over the Nashville Predators at the Bell Centre on Jan. 12.

After a solid performance in that game, and two more good ones in New York over the weekend, Barron found a way to embrace the opportunity Tuesday’s game presented.

It’s not as if it came without pressure. Mike Matheson returned after a month-long battle with a lower-body injury and bumped Chris Wideman off the blue line while threatening to bump any other underperforming player out so long as he’s healthy and the Canadiens are aiming to get back to playing with just six defencemen rather than seven. But Barron was able to free himself of that.

That is the challenge so many young, inexperienced players are facing in Montreal this season, in a hockey-mad market where the Canadiens, who are rebuilding, are being given a pass by fans on team results but not on individual performances.

In this game against the top team in the Western Conference, several of the kids were once again under the gun. With Joel Armia and Jonathan Drouin injured and unable to play, Jesse Ylonen, who spent his first 34 games in Laval, was promoted to Montreal’s top line with Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki and challenged to show what he could do offensively after just four games with the Canadiens this season. With Jake Allen out, Samuel Montembeault, who has just 80 games of NHL experience, was making a fifth consecutive start and facing a challenge to continue proving he can take on more even once Allen returns from injury.

Rem Pitlick, who put up 26 points in 46 games with the Canadiens last season, had spent more games in Laval than he had in Montreal before being recalled on Tuesday, and the game against the Jets presented yet another opportunity to redeem his NHL career.

When we asked him about that after the morning skate, about embracing that opportunity versus being overwhelmed by it, he gave a genuine response.

“It’s not easy,” Pitlick said. “There’s definitely a lot of internal mental chatter. But I know last year I was able to be successful, I know that I can do it. There’s ups and downs in hockey. The game happens so fast, you have no choice but to just let your body do it.”

Not letting your mind get in the way is the challenge all these players face.

“Don’t feel like you need to be perfect,” is how Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis said he’d approach it. “Trying to be perfect is not going to keep you in this league. You’ve gotta be willing to express yourself inside the structure, with the mentality of taking care of the team; you can’t just go, ‘I can’t make any mistakes tonight,’ because that’s when there’s going to be some hesitation in your game. You’ve just gotta play.

"You’re going to want three, four plays back a game and, knowing that, just don’t dwell if you make a mistake on your first or second shift and then it affects your next one and you feel the window is closing already and the game is not even over. To me, it’s just, try to play free. With that kind of opportunity, there’s always going to be stress and pressure. Try not to get lost in the stage and enjoy it and have fun and enjoy the opportunity, enjoy the challenge.”

Johnathan Kovacevic, who came to the Canadiens from the Jets via waivers on Oct. 8, talked about how much effort he’s put into that process since staring down the best opportunity of his career after three seasons of college hockey, three full seasons in the AHL, and just four games with Winnipeg.

“There is going to be that pressure, and that nervousness as well, and I feel like in your first year it’s only going to be natural to kind of feel both,” Kovacevic, 25, said. “And that’s why when I have those feelings, I guess I try not to feel bad for feeling pressure. Because there is pressure, and there is excitement, and those things are so closely related at times. That’s the cool thing about this job and this lifestyle as a career is you get to be in those moments that not everyone gets to do.

“I guess how I would balance that is recognizing both those feelings are OK to feel. And then when it comes to gametime, just trusting in the work that you’ve done to get you here because a lot of times it’s going to be uncertain; what happens in the moment is very uncertain. You know you put in all the work you could to lead yourself up here so that you have no regrets no matter how it goes.”

He’s settled well into that groove and was right in its pocket against the Jets on Tuesday.

Not that anyone would’ve noticed Kovacevic on a night where Dadonov scored two goals to double his total on the season and Barron put in a first-star performance, but the hallmark of being a steady, reliable defenceman is going unnoticed.

Kovacevic played free, as he has for the most part since debuting with the Canadiens. Montembeault made 24 saves on 25 shots to boost his save percentage to .946 over his last five starts. Pitlick may have taken a penalty at the end of the first period but played a steady game, and Ylonen may not have scored but was dangerous alongside the Canadiens’ best players.

It took Barron time, just as it had last season (when he was acquired in the trade that sent Artturi Lehkonen to the Colorado Avalanche), but he settled in a few games ago and really appeared comfortable against the Jets.

We’ll see where a game like the one he played Tuesday takes him.