Young Canadiens Fuming After Second Period Collapse
The Montreal Canadiens didn't appreciate their own performance on Saturday night, and it sounds like they're ready to move on.
The Montreal Canadiens escaped Pittsburgh with a point yesterday, and while the game was highly entertaining for fans, the players are clearly getting tired of those big comebacks. In the last few years, the second period has become a recurrent problem for the Habs, and the players are starting to have enough of it.
Don’t tell Juraj Slafkovsky that counter performances such as the ones the Tricolore put in yesterday tend to happen in the early season; he doesn’t want to hear it:
You know, it’s our fifth year together now; we kind of talk about it every single year, you know. You have a lot of teams that have good starts to the season, and we want to be one of those teams. A second period like today can’t happen. We got a point; that’s obviously really good if you look at how we played in the second. Tuesday’s only going to be harder, so we’ve got to prepare.
A reporter served the big Slovak a ready-made excuse, and he flat-out refused to use it. Meanwhile, defenseman Lane Hutson wasn’t in a good mood, even dropping a swear word on camera:
It was the effect of trying to be too cute in the neutral zone; I got to stop [insert expletive here] …sorry. I’ve got to get some pucks in to start the second period, not mess around. I think we just got away from playing direct, getting pucks in, recovering them, playing in their end, so it definitely hurt us. When we have a shift like that, we’ve got to flip it, take ourselves out of it, but we didn’t really get to do that.
Much like Slafkovsky, the defenseman refused to use the length of training camp or the fact that it’s the start of a season as an excuse:
No, I don’t think so. We’re smart enough players, a group that’s been together for quite a while now, that knows what we want to do, so it’s easy fixes, but we just got to go out and do it.
While it sounds like an easy fix, the team has been plagued by the second-period issue for quite some time, so it can’t be that easy. Even the fact that the Canadiens are a young team is starting to wear thin, because although they are young, they’ve already played a lot of NHL hockey.
As for Nick Suzuki, he explained:
I think we got a little complacent in the second, thinking we were too good, so that’s a good learning lesson, but it just can’t happen on Tuesday. […] We kept turning pucks over through the neutral zone, which is never good, and on the long changes and the penalty kill, they got power-play goals, so we were just shooting ourselves in the foot. We’ve probably learned from that already, so we've got to be better from that. We must be accountable to each other; guys in this room feel like they could have played better. I don’t think short camp is an excuse; every team is doing it. We even got an extra game, so we can’t put it like that. I know how good of a team we are, and obviously we’ve got a big matchup coming on Tuesday.
The mention of “No Excuses” may not be in the locker room anymore, but it feels like this young group has had enough of excuses, and they want to be held accountable and move forward. That’s good news for Martin St-Louis; coaching players who want to be held accountable and aren’t hiding behind excuses is much easier. Knowing St-Louis, both the coach and the player, he’ll be able to hold them accountable. Mike Babcock is not the only coach who can do that, even if that’s what Connor McDavid seems to think.
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