SAN JOSE, Calif.— It was a subtle play, but a perfect one to encapsulate what enabled the Montreal Canadiens to escape SAP Arena with a win for the first time since fear of Y2K dominated the world.
Just over halfway through the first period, Jeff Petry went to cut off San Jose’s Andrew Cogliano right as he crossed the blue line and entered Montreal’s end. Defence partner Ben Chiarot was close enough to Petry to collect the puck and dish it off to centre Christian Dvorak, who transitioned the play safely up ice.
Nothing came directly from this play, other than the puck moving quickly and cleanly out of the Canadiens’ end. In fact, all five Montreal players immediately opted for a change instead of pressing for a scoring chance, making it an easy play to dismiss as insignificant.
But this little sequence displayed the cohesiveness that was so sorely lacking through most of the first seven games of this Canadiens’ season. It was a building block in their first win in San Jose in 22 years.
The Canadiens were all together on Mike Hoffman’s opening goal on the very next shift. They were all together to kill off two ill-timed, terrible penalties from Joel Armia in the first period. They were all together on a faceoff play that gave Alex Romanov his first goal of the season and the Canadiens a 2-0 lead, all together on Brendan Gallagher’s power-play marker to make it 3-0 just over four minutes later, all together in all three zones over several other sequences and, you guessed it, all together celebrating after Josh Anderson scored his first of the season into an empty net to seal the deal 4-0.
“Results will come on our side when we commit and engage (in our structure),” said Canadiens coach Dominique Ducharme earlier on Thursday, and that proved to be the case later on.
“Following the game plan, everyone sticking to their roles and knowing what they’re capable of doing,” said Anderson to describe what he saw from the Canadiens. “I thought each line was going tonight and I thought we were all closer to the puck, which helped the D out a lot breaking out of our zone. It was a complete team effort.”
When it wasn’t—there were a few sloppy sequences in the first, several others early in the second, the Canadiens sat on the lead halfway through the third, and all of that was symptomatic of the type of fragility that sets in with six losses in seven games—Jake Allen came up with big saves.
He made 45 stops in all and was as much a part of this win as anyone else.
“I thought he played unbelievable tonight,” said Anderson.
But, most importantly for the Canadiens, everyone was involved.
Gallagher acknowledged on Tuesday morning that it had to be that way right here and now, even if he wasn’t going to call the game a must-win.
“I mean, we never use those words,” he said, “but there’s a sense of urgency that we need to increase. I think you understand the hole we’re in. We know how good teams are in this league, so we’ve got to string together some points.
“This isn’t a building we haven’t had a lot of success in, so it would be a good time to leave the rink feeling good about ourselves. There’s a lot of urgency. It started in the morning skate here and it’s going to carry over to tonight.”
It was a slow build out of the gate, but a build, nonetheless.
At the foundation of it was that innocuous sequence described above—Petry cutting off a play, Chiarot supporting him, Dvorak available to break clear the zone.
It was the type of little play the Canadiens hadn’t made with any regularity through the first seven games, but the one Ducharme tried to get them focused on in San Jose.
“I asked the guys this morning, ‘Why is it, when you go back in the summer, that your strength and conditioning coach works on your core,’” he said. “Because it makes you faster, because it gets you away from injury, because it gets you more powerful and faster and everything. And, as a team, that’s the same thing.”
Ducharme was talking about the essence of his system—playing as a five-man unit, playing the close-support style that generated so much success for the Canadiens last spring and summer.
“The core of our game, what keeps everything together—if don’t do that well, it can’t work,” he said after the game. “I felt we did good work on that end.”
The Canadiens will have to execute even better than they did on Thursday to keep going in the right direction, but at least they’re moving that way now.
