The Montreal Canadiens were back at practice on Monday morning in Brossard. While Martin St-Louis has pretty much stuck to the same formation so far this season, except for when injuries forced his hand, the coach had decided to make a significant change. He removed Brendan Gallagher from his veteran line to put him back with Kirby Dach and Zack Bolduc, which meant putting Joe Veleno with Jake Evans and Josh Anderson.

It's not that Martin St-Louis is dissatisfied with those two lines; he made it clear that he’s happy with their intentions, with the way they play the game, but he’d like to see if, by making that swap, the Habs could get more offensively from those two lines.

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Gallagher played the first five games of the season alongside Dach and Bolduc. The latter had four points in those five games, Dach had two of his three points in those games, and Gallagher got four of his six points during that span. As for Evans and Anderson, they played those first five games with Patrik Laine and were both held pointless. Even though Laine tried, he just wasn’t predictable enough for two guys who are used to playing a direct game.

Both picked up a couple of points since Gallagher joined them, but Bolduc and Dach’s offensive potential is, at least on paper, better. Bolduc was acquired this summer to provide secondary scoring, and leaving him on a line which St-Louis essentially admitted was put together because those were the players left after he had put the other three lines together, hardly sounds like a recipe for success.

Gallagher had always been very good at getting the best out of his linemates, and it worked early on in the season. It makes perfect sense to reunite the three and at least see if Veleno could work out with Anderson and Evans.

While the Canadiens have the second-highest goals-per-game average in the league (3.67), the Winnipeg Jets are at 3.75, yet the Canadiens often fail to pull away and put their opponents in a deeper hole, resulting in lost leads. If they were to get more secondary scoring, they may just be able to do it.

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