Not to nitpick after the Montreal Canadiens emerged from their building-opening tour through Toronto, Detroit and Chicago having earned two regulation wins, but Martin St. Louis might want to make some changes to his power play.
You’d understand the coach’s desire to give both his units more time to establish chemistry.
But St. Louis, who over-emphasized urgency through 22 days of training camp — and first ones to start this season — probably shouldn’t wait any longer than he already has. Especially not after seeing the Canadiens fumble eight of 10 opportunities to bury the Blackhawks at five-on-four before Kaiden Guhle banked one off Chicago goaltender Spencer Knight for the five-on-five goal that made it 3-2 with 15.7 seconds left to play.
It's not as if Montreal’s power play needs a complete overhaul.
As Nick Suzuki pointed out to reporters in Chicago after Saturday's game, power-play goals from Zachary Bolduc and Cole Caufield all but assured the Canadiens a point against the Blackhawks.
But coming up empty all the other times could’ve just as easily cost them two.
It nearly did with the game tied 2-2 and the Blackhawks making their best push through the final 18 minutes and change of penalty-less play.
“We didn’t execute,” St. Louis said of the Canadiens’ power play.
It was a continuation of what we saw from it through Wednesday’s and Thursday’s games against the Maple Leafs and Red Wings. It went one-for-five through those back-to-backs.
And now Montreal’s power play is three-for-15 on the season.
“I think we got to work on the power play a lot and learned a lot of stuff about it,” said Suzuki.
Most of what we learned watching it is the mix isn’t quite optimized just yet, and it’s not as if the sample size is too small to draw that conclusion.
The Canadiens have had the most power-play opportunities in the NHL so far and St. Louis can’t ignore how their execution seemed to diminish with each passing one.
The good news is, he can change it.
St. Louis has said one of the things he’s most encouraged about is having more options to choose from this season than he’s had at any other point of his four-and-a-half-year tenure. Well, he should waste no time exercising some different ones come Tuesday, when the Canadiens open the Bell Centre for the season against the Seattle Kraken.
It could be as simple as moving Noah Dobson to his top unit and reuniting Lane Hutson with Patrik Laine on his second one.
One of the reasons St. Louis would opt for that is it would give the top unit a right-handed one-timer option from the blue line.
Another is it would keep the right-handed Suzuki in the left corner of the offensive zone, where he can continue to set plays for the left-handed Bolduc in the bumper. That’s one element of the power play that’s working well right now.
Moving Laine to the left side of the top unit would undo it. But moving Hutson to the second one would maintain that option and reunite Hutson with Laine, whom he helped score 15 power-play goals last season.
It would also put Hutson and Laine with Ivan Demidov, and those three could do serious damage together.
Perhaps St. Louis might prefer to move Demidov to the first unit while moving Juraj Slafkovsky to the second one. Or perhaps the coach would prefer other personnel moves, or none at all.
But if he chooses to make none at all, we don’t see how he could avoid changing some of the strategy.
The results on the power play aren’t good enough so far, and the process doesn’t appear much better. Hence the Canadiens generating only 12 shots on net on their 10 power plays Saturday.
Only nine of their 25 shot attempts with the man-advantage came from the high-danger zone, making their performance anything but dangerous against the Blackhawks.
That’s something that shouldn’t sit well with St. Louis. It’s something he should want to fix immediately.
It only helps that the coach doesn’t have much else to focus on right now.
Without the matchups in the Canadiens’ favour on the road, and with the difficult task of having to play in three home openers in four nights to start the season, they’ve more than held their own at five-on-five. They’ve also killed off eight of 10 penalties and scored short-handed. And both their goaltenders are in the win column.
St. Louis should be happy about all of that. He should also be happy with how the Canadiens stuck together when physically challenged, with everyone from Kaiden Guhle to Demidov putting up the front in Saturday’s game.
There was a lot to like about how Montreal started its season.
But if we’re nitpicking…
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