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Hockey Hainsight
On the day the Canadiens announced that Christian Dvorak’s season was over, this loss to Buffalo exposed just how shallow the depth at center has become. In his morning media availability, head coach Martin St-Louis said, “we have four centers, we have options”, no Marty, that’s not options, that’s an obligation. When Kirby Dach went down to a season ending injury just two games into the season, Kent Hughes thanked his lucky start that he had put together a team with plenty of depth at center. Fast forward to three months later and both Alex Newhook and Christian Dvorak have now joined Dach on LTIR.
In other words, the head coach has got only four centers on hand; team captain and All-Star representative Nick Suzuki, veteran Sean Monahan, Jake Evans who’s got limited offensive upside and AHL call up Mitchell Stephens who’s never played more than 38 games in the NHL in a single season. Everyone is playing up in the line-up not because they managed to “steal a chair” as St-Louis encouraged his players to do during training camp, but because the chairs were left vacant.
Still, injuries are no excuse. As the pilot said when Newhook went down to injury, the league doesn’t care that you’ve got injuries, it just keeps on going which it did last night when the Canadiens played their first home game of the year. The fans who went through the Bell Centre’s proverbial turnstiles didn’t expect to witness such a poor performance. Asked to evaluate his team's performance, St-Louis simply said: “Pretty good first, that’s about it".
After that pretty good first, both teams went back to the locker room with a 0-0 score, but in the second, the Sabres were allowed to take charge. As is too often the case, the Canadiens took penalties that they were unable to kill, leading Buffalo to take a 2-0 lead.
The Habs are now 31st in the league when it comes to the success rate of their penalty kill with 72.1% and this has been a known issue for some time, meaning quite a few seasons. If the players are unanimous in their praises of head coach Martin St-Louis, it looks increasingly likely that the head coach could benefit from having an experienced assistant coach put in charge of the special team units. I’ve got nothing against Alex Burrows personally, but numbers don’t lie.
Buffalo scored two power play goals in quick succession early in the second frame and they never surrendered the lead or even looked like they might lose it. Joel Armia did score a shorthanded goal thanks to an all too rare individual effort, but Buffalo never looked back. Jeff Skinner had himself yet another excellent outing against Montreal scoring one goal and picking up three helpers and Devon Levi shone in his first game at the Bell Centre. The Dollard-des-Ormeaux native got the better of his childhood team and admitted that being a long time Canadiens’ fans, he listens to “Fix You” before every single game in his headphones, but that for once he didn’t have to since it’s the song the Habs play when they come on the ice every night. Perhaps the Canadiens’ coaching staff should take heed of the song’s lyrics and fix what’s been ailing this team for so long.
On the brighter side of things, Canadiens’ prospects Lane Hutson and Jacob Fowler will be playing for gold today (1:30 PM ET) when Team USA takes on Sweden in the final of the World Junior Championships. If Fowler is expected to serve as back-up to number one goaltender Trey Augustine, Hutson should once again play an important role in the team’s fortune. Through six games, the blue liner has gathered six assists and spent more time than any other American player on the ice. He’s also been named one of Team USA’s top three players in the tournament and has been used in all kind of scenarios.
The Canadiens will practice in Brossard at 11:30 today and they’ll be back on the Bell Centre ice tomorrow evening to take on the New York Rangers. It will be the first meeting of the season between the two sides and the Habs will be the underdogs as the Rangers are currently first in the league with 53 points.
Montreal Canadiens Blogger • 
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