TORONTO — “Once it starts back up Tuesday, it’s all zeroes again,” Samuel Montembeault said after closing out a near-perfect pre-season that enabled him to solidify his place behind Jakub Dobes on the Montreal Canadiens opening roster.
That level of sobriety was easy to come by for the goaltender who had the ground fall out from underneath him just last winter.
If anyone on this team knows how quick the tumble from grace can come — and how hard the landing can feel — it’s Montembeault, who stopped more expected goals than all but four goaltenders in the NHL in 2024-25 but struggled more than just about any goaltender in the league to make a save last season. He went from No. 1 to no one in mere months, so treating his two-week reclamation of name and face as tenuous feels both natural and necessary.
It seems necessary for Montembeault’s teammates to also treat this upcoming season the same way, though you can’t help but wonder just how naturally inclined they’ll be to do that.
Like Montembeault, who travelled the arduous path from waiver claim to backup to starting goaltender to top-tier starting goaltender through his first four years in Montreal, the Canadiens emerged from the ashes of a rebuild and walked towards competing before arriving at winning and now being expected to contend. But unlike Montembeault, they’re still standing on high ground.
If things go as coach Martin St. Louis expects, the Canadiens will avoid losing their balance and tumbling, because he believes they’ve avoided getting drunk on their most recent success.
“I feel like we live with that mentality. Every day, we start over,” St. Louis said after Montembeault stopped 14 shots in regulation and four of five in the pre-planned shootout that took place after the Canadiens beat the Ottawa Senators 4-2 last Saturday to emerge from exhibition with a 4-1 record.
“Whether you had a good game the night before or a bad game, you’ve got to start over, and I feel like we have that mentality — process-driven, not get too high, too low with the actual result,” St. Louis continued. “I feel like when you’re process-driven like that, usually things take care of themselves. We try to be like that as a team, and I think it has bled down to how the individuals actually see it as well, and it helps them go through the grind of an NHL season.”
We’ll begin finding out Tuesday, with the Canadiens facing a Toronto Maple Leafs team champing at the bit to knock them down a peg.
The Maple Leafs’ fall to 28th place last season — after nine consecutive playoff berths — was swift and humbling. And now, with a remodelled roster, they have a golden opportunity to immediately bolster renewed hope while planting a seed of doubt for their oldest rivals.
But maybe just a seed for a rising Canadiens team that earned 106 points in the standings last season and took out equally good teams in Tampa Bay and Buffalo in the playoffs before losing to the eventual Stanley Cup-champion Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Final.
Montembeault was mostly right — it all goes back to zeroes ahead of Game 1 of this season.
Except for self-belief, which, of course, is justifiably well-embedded in the Canadiens’ locker room.
The only new member of it, Chris Kreider, has been talking about how healthy it is, about how he’s only observed a consistent culture of commitment to improving since arriving in Montreal just over two weeks ago.
“It’s a lot of fun, but everyone works really hard,” the 35-year-old, who’s coming into his 15th NHL season, said after scoring his first goal as a Canadien at the Bell Centre in last Saturday’s win. “The guys are on the ice early, getting their touches every single day. Guys are on the ice late. They love working, and they have fun doing it.”
From his experience on good and bad New York Rangers teams and the up-and-coming Anaheim Ducks of the last two seasons, Kreider knows the value of that — especially in the face of rising expectations.
“The thing about Kreids is he’s got perspective. He’s played in the league for a long time, so he’s able to compare things,” St. Louis said to reporters in Brossard, Que., before the Canadiens departed for Toronto Monday. “So, if he feels good about this environment being here for, I don’t know, three weeks now, it’s great to hear. Because it’s hard to describe that (from just observing); it’s something you (need to) see, feel. So, it’s great to hear.”
He said he liked what Montembeault said last Saturday, too.
And we’re sure St. Louis probably enjoyed hearing Dobes reiterate those thoughts Monday when he said, “We’ll just go day by day.”
It’s the best approach for the start of a marathon, even if the Canadiens appear more prepared for this one than any other they’ve run since their rebuild began in 2022.
They’re that much deeper, as evidenced by sending three emerging NHL players — Owen Beck, David Reinbacher and Jacob Fowler — back to the American Hockey League and keeping two, Florian Xhekaj and Adam Engstrom, on the margin of their roster. The least experienced players in their opening lineup are Dobes and Ivan Demidov, who both finished among the top four vote-getters for the Calder Trophy for rookie of the year. And everyone else dressing up to play in Toronto has at least 150 games under his belt.
What some of these Canadiens have done with not much more than that has been astounding (here’s looking at you, Lane Hutson). And the young guys with nearly double or more (Juraj Slafkovsky, Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield) still have ceiling above them, which is as good a reason as any why the expectations for the Canadiens have risen so high.
“We’ve earned that,” said St. Louis. “We know what kind of responsibility comes with that, and I feel like we come in each and every day living up to our own standards and what we’ve built.”
Now the task is to remain grounded and keep doing it.
