Despite win over Mammoth, Canadiens' need for veteran help becomes more obvious

It took four minutes and nine seconds for the Montreal Canadiens to turn a 2-0 lead into a 3-2 deficit in Utah on Wednesday, and to see it happen in the second period was anything but surprising.

It’s in that middle frame that the youngest team in the National Hockey League has flashed its greenness this season, with bad penalties and worse puck management often putting them in a precarious position.

On this night, all it ended up costing the Canadiens was the lead.

But their ability to wrestle it back and beat the Mammoth 4-3 didn’t alter the reality they have a problem only management can fix at this point.

With veterans Kirby Dach, Alex Newhook, Patrik Laine and Kaiden Guhle sidelined, the youngest team in the league has gotten younger. And the repeated immaturity the team has displayed in the middle of games — they’re now minus-11 in goal differential in the second period — suggests they’re too young.

It’s why Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes gave a prorated $1-million contract for the rest of this season to 26-year-old Alexandre Texier on Sunday, and it’s why he won’t stop looking to fill holes both up front and on the back end of his team.

If you want a sense of how dire the need has become, forget about rewatching the immature second period. You can just skip ahead to the third.

Two rookies watched almost the entirety of it from the team’s bench, with a third not seeing the ice for any of it.

It was perfectly understandable for Martin St. Louis not to expose Florian Xhekaj beyond one shift after the Canadiens tied the game 3:20 into the third. This was just his second game in the league.

That Adam Engstrom got out for as many as three shifts in the third was impressive, considering it was his first career NHL game.

Jared Davidson might not have played in the third regardless in what was the fifth game of his NHL career, but he certainly wasn’t going to after taking an unsportsmanlike penalty on top of one for roughing to give the Mammoth a power-play directly following Michael Carcone capping their three-goal run in less than five minutes of the second.

Still, St. Louis needing to shorten his bench to this extent for the first of three games in four nights, and the first of 16 games over the next 28 nights, was a problem.

It was a problem that Mike Matheson had to play 11:12 of the third period, including two shifts — one on the penalty kill and one at five-on-six with Utah trying to tie the game — that were over 2:30. It’s was a problem that Nick Suzuki, who had two goals and an assist to break the 400-point barrier, had to play 9:49 of that last period.

Josh Anderson, who has 638 games of NHL experience, had to play 33 per cent more than Ivan Demidov and Oliver Kapanen, who have 64 games of NHL experience between them.

Not that youth was underserved in the end, because Demidov and Kapanen still got on the ice to combine for what proved to be the winning goal.

But after Demidov pulled it in and fired it past Karel Vejmelka in the 45^th minute of play, St. Louis had too small a pool of players he could trust to pull from to lock down the game.

With Montreal’s schedule only condensing from this point forward, having more trustworthy depth will only become more important.

Hey, at least on this night, the Canadiens came out of the game with a win, and for the first time in too long feeling like they have a goaltender who can bail them out.

It had been a while since Jakub Dobes inspired as much confidence, but without him the outcome would’ve been a blown lead and a blowout loss. The Canadiens gave up 25 scoring chances, and Dobes supressed most of them.

At five-on-five, in that lopsided second period, he couldn’t stop all of them.

Still, the Canadiens allowed Utah to generate seven high-danger chances and Dobes was the reason the Mammoth didn’t capitalize on more than two.

Barrett Hayton’s power-play marker to get his team on the board came from 25 feet out and was a bang-bang play that couldn’t be defended or saved.

Bookending it were the plays the Canadiens made to feed the Mammoth every opportunity to bury them. They were the type of plays this young team made too often over a recent skid that saw them lose seven of eight games and five in a row before finally exhibiting some maturity in a 5-2 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday.

Surely Texier will debut in Las Vegas on Friday, but the Canadiens are going to need more than his 240 games of experience inserted into their lineup before long.

Dach is out at least three more weeks with a broken foot. Newhook is out until at least mid-February after a recent surgery to repair a broken ankle. Laine’s out at least that long after surgery to repair a core muscle, and Guhle’s surgery on a torn adductor muscle will keep him out until at least mid-January.

Hughes was already scouring the market for help before Wednesday’s game in Utah, and the way it went must’ve only made him feel like he must search with more urgency.