MONTREAL — The pause was a long one, about 10 or 15 seconds. Martin St. Louis often takes his time to answer a question, to think about his answer, to put thought into it. But this was especially long.
After repeating numerous times throughout the Canadiens’ seven-game winless streak, one in which they were outscored 36-12, that he was learning as a coach, St. Louis was asked Saturday morning before facing the St. Louis Blues what he had learned over this slide.
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The pause was telling. The thought he put into the answer was telling because one thing St. Louis has consistently displayed since taking this job a little less than a year ago is humility, an awareness that he is not a seasoned professional coach and he has a lot to learn. This losing streak only made it more blatant.
“The biggest thing for me is it happens quick,” he began. “Like, I didn’t love our game in Arizona. We won. Colorado, we got a point. Our game was slipping, but we were getting points, and then all of a sudden it just really went down.”
He didn’t stop there.
“It’s to stay on the task,” he continued. “I felt when we slipped there were so many things that were going wrong for us — the PK, the PP — and I think I focused on that too much and forgot the five-on-five game a little bit, and then that five-on-five game really slipped. So maybe, if anything, really, don’t forget about the five-on-five game. As a coach, you understand the special teams are so important, and when you want to get results, sometimes you focus on the special teams a little too much. And I think that’s what I learned, is I should have paid more attention to the five-on-five game when we were starting to slip.”
There’s a lot there, but the most important thing was St. Louis’ acknowledgment that he allowed the results to cloud the process for a couple of games, and when that bit him, it bit him hard. St. Louis has said it often this season — that results are not his priority, that development and process and maintaining his team’s identity are the most important things. He forgot that momentarily, and the next thing he knew, his team was in a tailspin.
And that’s fine. It’s a good lesson for a young coach to learn, and Martin St. Louis is a young coach in charge of a young team, one that is trying to have its cake of learning in a competitive environment and eat it, too, with results that leave it in position to get a high pick in a talent-rich NHL Draft. The Canadiens’ surprisingly strong start to the season helped that primary objective a great deal but hurt the secondary one. This losing streak helped the second objective but hurt the primary one. It’s a difficult line to straddle, but this is the Canadiens’ reality this season.
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Meeting both objectives is difficult without periods where one objective suffers in favour of the other. What’s important is for the team to draw value out of those seemingly disparate periods. And the value of this latest period for the Canadiens, now and primarily in the future, is that St. Louis becomes a better coach as a result.
Coming from behind to beat the Blues 5-4 on Saturday night, winning in a way that often worked earlier in the season, is not necessarily proof that has happened. But it is evidence that it could be in the process of happening.
There’s a parallel here that might be a bit clumsy but that applies nonetheless.
Joel Armia was in a dark place a few weeks ago. On Dec. 12, after a morning skate, he spoke openly and honestly about how difficult his inability to produce has been on him mentally and how he had availed himself of a new resource the Canadiens have made available to their players: a full-time performance coach, Jean-François Ménard.
“Unfortunately, he hasn’t scored yet, but he has all the tools to score goals in this league,” St. Louis said then, after Armia missed numerous opportunities to break his goose egg in a win against the Calgary Flames. “I’m sure once he scores one, they’re going to come in bunches.”
It took nearly a month, but Armia now has three goals in his past two games after scoring twice against the Blues. His first goal of the game came after Jake Neighbours fell as Armia quickly made him think he was driving the puck down the boards and curled toward the blue line, opening space for him. Coming off scoring his first goal of the season against the New York Rangers two nights earlier, Armia was feeling a little more confident than he was Dec. 12 and pretty much every day since. So rather than get rid of the puck, he held on to it, moved into the space he had just created and wired a shot inside the far post.
Cole 🤗 Armypic.twitter.com/tcwhRpSZFt
— Canadiens Montréal (@CanadiensMTL) January 8, 2023
“There’s a lot of games where I actually played well and just didn’t get the result,” Armia said. “But then you realize you don’t play that well, you get frustrated at yourself, you get scratched. I think the way for me to approach it was just to simplify everything. I don’t know if I changed that much; it was just to simplify things and work hard every night.”
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That goal was not simplifying things. It was a sign of a confident player, one who was moving past simplifying things and starting to trust his talent and knowledge.
“Yeah, I felt like that probably carried over from last game. I felt we played good as a line and as a team, too, last game,” Armia said. “So, I don’t know. It’s so tough to say what it is.”
St. Louis, too, has simplified things. His entire focus the past couple of games has been on the Canadiens’ play in the defensive zone. Allowing 22 goals in three games will do that, but that is the coach’s equivalent of simplifying things.
“I think our focus right now, last game, has totally shifted to our D-zone,” St. Louis said before Saturday’s game. “Our arrivals, our D-zone, how we exit versus pressure, it all starts there. The rest doesn’t matter if we don’t clean that up. So you focus on that, and I feel the rest will kind of take care of itself.
“I think that’s the foundation of any successful team, and I think we had lost our foundation.”
Re-establishing a team’s foundation during an awful losing streak is not an innate skill in a coach. It is learned over years, over many losing streaks, over many instances of recognizing that moment when your team has slipped and acting on it, regardless of the results.
It would be easy for St. Louis to get carried away with this one win, the Canadiens’ second win since that game against Calgary on Dec. 12, the one when St. Louis felt he had realized what his team was, only to have it show him it is not that at all from that point onward.
Remember, the biggest thing St. Louis feels he’s learned through this losing streak “is it happens quick,” but it’s just as important to realize it doesn’t necessarily happen quickly in the other direction.
“We’re going to keep what we’re doing right now and really focus on our D-zone,” St. Louis said after the win against the Blues. “I don’t know when we’re going to start focusing on something else. I think our performance, the way we play, it’s going to speak to me where I feel, OK, let’s move on. And you constantly have to remind (the players) of the stuff that’s important.
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“One of the powers you have in life is your response. Nobody loves struggles. Nobody says, ‘I can’t wait to struggle.’ We didn’t want that slide, but it happened, so now it’s the power of your response, it’s what you do from here. We’re trying to respond right now.”
Laying a foundation takes time; it doesn’t happen quickly. And if it’s not done properly, the house will crumble.
St. Louis is learning that, just as his young players are learning from their current predicament. And as painful as it might be in the moment, all these lessons should help the Canadiens in the future, from the coach on down.
(Photo of Martin St. Louis: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)