The Canadiens woke up Friday sitting firmly in 28th place in the NHL’s overall standings, four points out of 27th and six points up on 29th with 10 games to go, giving them an excellent chance of finishing the season with the fifth-best odds in the May 8 NHL draft lottery.
The Canadiens’ 4-2 loss to the Boston Bruins on Thursday completed a murderers’ row portion of their schedule, with them going 2-6-2 over a 10-game stretch against some of the best teams in the NHL. The Canadiens played five of the six top teams in the league, as of Friday afternoon, over that stretch. Not included in that group are the defending Stanley Cup champions, two games (and one win) against the team that won the Cup the two years prior, and two games against teams fighting for their lives to make the Eastern Conference playoffs.
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Getting six out of a possible 20 points in those games is nothing to celebrate unless you are invested in the Canadiens losing, which many of you are. Frankly, if you gave Canadiens management some truth serum, they would probably admit they are, too.
But watching the way Kirby Dach performed in his first two games back from a lower-body injury that kept him out a month, putting up two goals and an assist and generally being a dominant force that plays in the offensive end of the ice more often than not, got me thinking. What impact would a healthy Dach have had on that stretch of 10 games, where the Canadiens lost twice in a shootout, another game by one goal and another by two goals with an empty-netter at the end? Might he have made the difference between a win and a loss? How about having a healthy Josh Anderson on Thursday night in Boston? Could he have turned that result around?
The Canadiens’ multitude of injuries have been a talking point all season. In the first game that Dach missed on Feb. 16 in Carolina, he was one of nine Canadiens regulars out, not including Paul Byron and Carey Price. It’s an astounding number. The Canadiens’ strong performance in a losing effort in Boston came in large part because Dach, Jake Evans and Brendan Gallagher were back in the lineup, providing balance up front. But there were still seven regulars out of the lineup.
Whenever anyone suggests the Canadiens are tanking, that assumes some sort of intent in how the season is going, that this team was built to perform this way. Which is not true. A healthy Canadiens team is not a playoff team, but it is not this bad either. No, that’s simply a positive byproduct of the Canadiens’ horrible injury luck this season.
Which begs the question: what might have happened this season if the Canadiens had normal injury luck? If they simply had a few injuries at a time to deal with like most teams?
To some, it might just be a meaningless win in a lost season.
But after weeks of games that gave zero indication of what the future might hold for the Canadiens, this one game showed so many signs of it.@arponbasu explains: https://t.co/0ABvLlFNaE
— The Athletic NHL (@TheAthleticNHL) March 22, 2023
The Canadiens began the season missing Jonathan Drouin, Joel Armia, Mike Matheson and Joel Edmundson. Drouin returned in the third game of the season, leaving three regulars on the injured list, a situation that lasted all of two games before Juraj Slafkovský was injured for three games. When Sean Monahan went down on Dec. 5, never to be seen again, the Canadiens had a 12-11-2 record, and that is when the injuries — and the losses — began to pile up.
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The Canadiens’ underlying numbers back then suggested a fall was coming, but injuries to David Savard, Brendan Gallagher, Matheson (again), Gallagher (again), Armia (again), Edmundson (again), Slafkovský (again), Cole Caufield, Kaiden Guhle and others ensured that fall ultimately came, and it came hard.
What might have happened had those injuries not happened? The Canadiens would have likely fallen regardless, just not quite as hard, and they likely would not be sitting with the fifth-best odds in the draft lottery right now. They might be closer to the 10th best. But we also would have gotten a better idea of what’s to come in the future. Let’s look at a few hypotheticals in that regard.
Mike Matheson
Matheson was first injured in the preseason and missed the first five weeks of the regular season. He then played nine games, missed another four to injury, returned for one game and was immediately gone for another month. Matheson’s 11th game of the season came on Jan. 17.
When Matheson returned from the bye week on Feb. 11 — having played roughly the same amount of time as a typical training camp since Jan. 17 — Matheson took off. Since that date, prior to Friday’s games, Matheson is sixth in scoring by defencemen with 17 points in 21 games. His seven goals in that span lead the league.
It’s probably unfair to take that 21-game sample and extrapolate it to 82 games to come up with a 66-point pace, but it is fair to take that significant sample and say Matheson would have obliterated his previous career high of 31 points set last season with the Pittsburgh Penguins. As it stands, he only needs seven points in his final 10 games to better that mark despite missing essentially the entire first half of the season.
Let’s be conservative and say Matheson could have hit 50 points this season if he stayed healthy. That would have put him somewhere in the top-15 in defenceman scoring. That would have made a massive difference, much to the detriment of the Canadiens’ lottery odds.
Cole Caufield
At the time Caufield was shut down for the season on Jan. 20 to have shoulder surgery, he had scored seven goals in his previous 10 games. He had 26 goals in 46 games, on pace for a 46-goal season, meaning these last 10 games would be dominated by talk of whether he could hit 50 this season.
Since Caufield went down, the Canadiens lost four games by one goal and three others in overtime or a shootout. So, seven games where a goal could have made a big difference. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where Caufield made a difference in two or three of those games.
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Kaiden Guhle
When Guhle was injured on Dec. 29 in Florida, he was second among rookie defencemen in scoring with 14 points and third in average ice time. With all of those 14 points coming at even strength, Guhle actually led all rookie defencemen in that category (followed by Jordan Harris and Arber Xhekaj). Had Guhle’s improvement continued uninterrupted, his impact on games could have grown significantly.
That would have come with added points in the standings. The Canadiens surely would have taken that tradeoff — more standings points for a more developed Guhle — but Martin St. Louis has mentioned numerous times they feel they got a sufficient sample size with a healthy Guhle to know what they have moving forward.
Juraj Slafkovský
We’ve been hearing a lot of noise about Slafkovský’s rookie season — how the pick was a mistake, how starting him in the NHL was a mistake — and all of that might turn out to be true. It’s just impossible to know right now.
At the time of his knee injury on Jan. 15, Slafkovský had 15 straight games without so much as a point. He failed to register a shot on goal in eight of those games. He was definitely trending downward.
But do you know one thing Slafkovský did while he was out injured? He returned to Slovakia to finish his high school diploma.
Some perspective is required here, and hypothesizing that Slafkovský would have shown some growth over the final 38 games of the season is not much of a stretch. Would he have been a difference-maker like Dach has been in that time? Probably not. But many were quick to judge Dach at that age as well, and perhaps something might have clicked for Slafkovský where he started contributing to winning hockey.
Brendan Gallagher
Much like Slafkovský, Gallagher’s game was not trending in the right direction when he was first injured on Nov. 29, but during a season where St. Louis is constantly noting the importance of building a culture, a foundation, someone like Gallagher would have helped immensely. Joel Edmundson as well. Would that have had a big impact on the standings? Hard to say. But it definitely would have helped take some of the load off Nick Suzuki, the only Canadien to play in every game so far this season, in his first season as captain.
The other side of the coin here is that the sheer amount of injuries allowed players like Rafaël Harvey-Pinard and Jesse Ylönen and Justin Barron to get valuable experience and a legitimate claim on a role with the big club next season.
But when you looked at the overall standings Friday afternoon and saw the Canadiens 10 points behind the Buffalo Sabres, or 10 points away from the 11th-best lottery odds and a likely pick outside the top 10 in the draft, the sheer amount of injuries to important players, including some not listed here, start to look like a blessing in disguise. You can make up 10 points over four months pretty easily, especially with all the one-goal games the Canadiens have played, and especially with the way the replacement group began responding to the way St. Louis wanted them to play. Giving a developing coach a relatively healthy lineup to work with might have led to vastly different results.
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So, while certain individual players probably would have come out ahead had they remained healthy, a top-5 pick would have likely been out of the question. And ultimately, that is what will move the Canadiens further along the path to building a sustainably competitive team.
And while what the Canadiens have right now isn’t exactly perfect, it’s also not quite that bad, and it’s worth remembering that as they play out their final 10 games.
(Top photo of Jake Evans: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)