LAS VEGAS — The day after Juraj Slafkovský’s first mediocre game of the season, last Thursday against the Columbus Blue Jackets, he was sitting at his locker after practice when he was asked casually if he thought it was a bit of a rough game compared to his first six games of the season.
Slafkovský just shrugged.
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He has said in the past that he brought tough games home with him, that he had trouble letting them go. So really, that shrug was rather telling, because it was not one of his better games.
“I’m getting better at leaving it at the rink,” he said.
That’s growth. Because his game on the ice will not improve if he’s carrying it with him at all times, as he admitted he did before.
Brendan Gallagher was once like Slafkovský in that sense, but he said living with Josh Gorges for the first few years of his career helped him manage that proper work-life balance. Slafkovský lives by himself, so that’s something he needs to learn on his own, alone in his condo with his thoughts.
His following game Saturday night against the Winnipeg Jets was not much better. In fact, it was probably worse. He was not much of a factor offensively, not making things happen, not really imposing his will on the game. There was a moment on the power play where Slafkovský was waiting for a rim around the boards and he processed that waiting would not have allowed him to win the puck. So he moved up the boards, aggressively claimed his space and won that puck, only to give it away a moment later when he attempted to make a pass.
Slafkovský has one assist through eight games, and coach Martin St. Louis is fully aware he needs to nurture him. This is why he continues to focus on puck touches and not goals and assists with him.
“Personally, I’m happy with Slaf because he’s touching the puck a lot,” St. Louis said at the team hotel in Vegas on Sunday. “Compared to last year, it’s a big difference. So his evolution, already in 12 months, I find it very encouraging, and I’m very eager to see him in 12 months, because he’s only 19.
“But for sure, scoring a goal or producing, all that helps a player. But it’s about not concentrating on the results and focusing on the process. I talk about that with him all the time because he’s in the right spots.”
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Late in the game against the Jets on Saturday, St. Louis moved Josh Anderson back to the top line with Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield, and dropped Rafaël Harvey-Pinard to the line with Slafkovský and Alex Newhook. Anderson also has one assist in eight games, and while his process is good, his numbers are not.
“Two games ago I felt they were probably our best line and they didn’t get rewarded,” St. Louis said. “It weighs on the guys sometimes. I don’t think their last game was their best game, and I think it’s the weight that you can carry sometimes, and you’ve got to let it go. I’m very confident that those guys will find the scoresheet soon enough.”
The importance of nurturing a role
When the regular season began, Jesse Ylönen was still living in a hotel. He lived in Laval last season, and wasn’t sure if he should live there again or not. As training camp progressed, he saw himself getting minutes on the penalty kill, and it was becoming clearer that he had a role on this team.
But still, Ylönen waited to find more permanent lodging for him and his wife. Ultimately, they settled on a condo in Old Montreal, because Ylönen was sufficiently convinced he would not be going to Laval.
His role on the penalty kill was a big part of that assurance, something he has never really done before.
“When I played in Finland and then in Laval, I’ve always been the power-play guy,” he said. “So that’s why the coaches probably didn’t need me to kill penalties. Here it’s obviously way harder to be on the power play, so I feel like if you don’t play PK and PP, it’s hard to help the team. So I’m really happy that the coaching staff has given me the opportunity to kill penalties and I’m really motivated to get better at it. I don’t have much experience doing it, but I’ve been trying to focus on it, watch plays and learn and take pride in being really good at it in the future.”
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St. Louis, as we noted in last week’s notebook, said it was important for Ylönen to feel he had a role on the team.
The Canadiens have been happy with Ylönen’s work on the penalty kill, and his play overall, but when it came time to work Joel Armia into the lineup, it was Ylönen who sat as a result on Saturday against the Jets. Michael Pezzetta remained in.
Again, this was a messaging play for St. Louis, because he felt Pezzetta had earned his spot in the lineup through his play, and he needed to know that.
“Pezz has played really well for us,” St. Louis said Sunday. “For me it was more about getting Army in, and historically, Pezz has been the easy guy to take out. So I just didn’t want to make the easy decision, I wanted to make the right one. And the right one was to keep him in because he’s playing really well. And not that (Ylönen) hasn’t played well, he’s played great too. But I think last year Pezz was the easy guy to take out, so he earned staying in because he’s been there, done that a little bit.
“He had earned to stay in.”
Pezzetta spent a lot of time as a healthy scratch when St. Louis came on board last season, which meant he got to spend extra time after morning skates working with St. Louis and the rest of his coaching staff. Much like Slafkovský, it is important for St. Louis to demonstrate that process is more important than results for Pezzetta. And he did that by keeping him in the lineup for a game.
But Ylönen’s growth seems more important to the Canadiens’ future than Pezzetta’s, and it is worth wondering how he felt about the importance of process when he was scratched to make room for Armia. This is a thin line St. Louis needs to straddle, but that one decision showed how much he values the work Pezzetta has put in to become more of a multi-dimensional player and not simply an energy guy who can fight.
Sending Mešár to Kitchener put in context
Filip Mešár is a first-round draft choice, and though he wanted to play in Laval this season, the Canadiens decided to send him back to Kitchener in the OHL for the second season in a row.
With Riley Kidney, Sean Farrell and Xavier Simoneau already on the team in Laval, coach Jean-François Houle said last week it became a little complicated getting that many smaller bodies into the lineup at the same time.
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When asked whether people understand how physically demanding the AHL can be, Houle didn’t even wait for the question to be finished before responding, “They don’t.” It’s a thing, with AHL veterans playing a physical brand of hockey and particularly targeting younger players with a slight build.
In that context, Mešár simply didn’t fit.
“Being able to put Mešár in the right chair when you have to give quality ice time to Kidney, (Joshua) Roy, Farrell, Simoneau, it became a lot,” Houle said. “So I think that was part of the reasoning. They’re all more or less cut from the same cloth, so that was a factor.”
Positionless hockey taking hold
When Kaiden Guhle was called for tripping Vladislav Namestnikov late in the second period Saturday against the Jets, you could see St. Louis mouthing to the referee, in terms that were not quite this polite, that he was engaged in a puck battle.
But less than the actual circumstances of the penalty, what was more interesting about the situation was that Guhle was below the opposing goal line to begin with.
“I think I pinched, the puck was kind of going to the corner and I was the first guy there. Trying to stay balanced, as Marty always says,” Guhle said Saturday night. “I was F1 at that point.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be F1 anymore.”
Again, there is much debate on whether that should have been a penalty or not, but the fact Guhle was able to recognize he should be F1 in that situation is telling. That is something the Canadiens defence is told to do, and once Guhle was in that situation, he went for it.
“For me, on that play, he was in the right spot,” Canadiens assistant coach Stéphane Robidas said Sunday.
The Canadiens want their defencemen all over the ice, depending on the situation. Forwards will cover for you if you do what the situation calls for.
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It is a liberty this defence corps is encouraged to feel, and also a nod to the way the modern game is played.
A hand doctor chimes in on David Savard’s timeline
David Savard has a cast on his left hand after blocking a Tage Thompson slap shot with it in the dying moments of a game in Buffalo last week. His initial prognosis was an absence of six to eight weeks with a fractured left hand.
We consulted a hand specialist, Dr. David Clark Hay, who has been a hand consultant for the Anaheim Ducks for over a decade and works at the prestigious Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute in Los Angeles on what he thought about that timeline. It needs to be heavily emphasized that Dr. Hay has not examined Savard, so his opinion is entirely theoretical. But the timeline sounds right to him.
“The non-surgical just tells us that, whatever kind of fracture it is, it was likely non-displaced. And so the thinking is that it can heal perfectly fine with immobilization,” Dr. Hay said. “There’s three to four weeks where you have to immobilize it with no motion, and within the first three to four weeks you’re starting to get soft callous, sort of the consistency of rubber cement that starts to harden, and then you only get it to mineralize at six to eight weeks. So the first three weeks you need to really immobilize it, then three or four weeks of motion to get the motion back while the healing is catching up to that six-to-eight-week point where it’s strong enough to be worth the risk-benefit of pushing it.”
Ultimately, based on Dr. Hay’s opinion, expecting an absence for Savard closer to eight weeks than six seems more likely.
(Top photo of Winnipeg’s Nino Niederreiter taking down Juraj Slafkovský: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)