Montreal Canadiens defenceman Kaiden Guhle is the type of player you can start to take for granted the more you watch him play. The simplicity, the efficiency, the strong positioning — none of it necessarily pops. It’s the consistency of it, shift after shift, night after night, that should pop, especially for someone who only turns 23 next month.
Sometimes, you need an outside perspective to get a real appreciation for it.
Enter Guhle’s new defence partner Alexandre Carrier, who played for two years next to another defensive defenceman, Jeremy Lauzon, with the Nashville Predators. Carrier was asked after the game Saturday night how Guhle compares to Lauzon, at least stylistically, if not in terms of actual skill.
Carrier immediately felt uncomfortable with the question. He didn’t want to throw his old defence partner under the bus, but he definitely felt it was an unfair comparison. There was, however, an old defence partner of his that Carrier felt was a more appropriate comparison.
“He reminds me a lot of (Mattias) Ekholm, actually. My first two years were with him, and he reminds me a lot of him,” Carrier said. “To say that at 22, I was really impressed last night, again tonight. I knew his game, but I didn’t know that much.”
What impressed Carrier is Guhle’s feet and that he’s a bigger guy but doesn’t only rely on that to defend, using both his feet and his stick effectively. But more broadly, it’s how Guhle plays the game that has struck Carrier early on in their partnership.
“I think his game management, how smart he is with the puck,” Carrier said. “He doesn’t put himself in a lot of trouble.”
And with Carrier also being a strong skater, a defender who uses his feet and brain and compete to compensate for his lack of size, he sees a bright future for the pairing once he gets up to speed on some of the Canadiens’ concepts he’s still trying to figure out.
“Playing with Kaiden is easy — he’s a good skater, I think we complete each other well that way. There are a few things I’m still not sure about in terms of the system. When I’m going to be sure about those things I think we’ll be more dangerous defensively together,” Carrier said. “I think gapping up. You want to be in their face as quick as possible. I think we were playing mostly against the top lines as well. I think we’re both good skaters, so if we can gap up as soon as possible, and really being close together and having a good stick. He’s a bigger body than me but I think he defends really well with his skates and his stick. We’re similar, so that’s how we can complement each other.”
A little peek inside Lane Hutson’s offensive mind
At one point while Carrier was talking after the game Saturday, he pointed to Hutson’s locker to explain how he’s managed to survive in the NHL as a 5-foot-11 defenceman.
“To stay in this league, if you’re not like Hutson, you’ve got to find a way,” he said. “So for me, it’s about being competitive.”
Being like Hutson, see, is rare. The look on Carrier’s face as he said it made that pretty clear. And what Hutson has done through his first 35 NHL games has made that even clearer.
Most assists in a defenceman’s first 35 career games – NHL history:
32- Larry Murphy
26- Lane Hutson (Via 2 in Saturday’s @CanadiensMTL win vs the Red Wings)
26- Stefan Persson
26- Nicklas Lidstrom
25- Brian Leetch
25- Quinn Hughes
24- Phil Housley
23- Cale Makar
22- Ray Bourque pic.twitter.com/rwxEZKufr9— StatsCentre (@StatsCentre) December 22, 2024
Here is an example of what being like Hutson is like. A few weeks ago against the Washington Capitals, he did this to spring Brendan Gallagher on a breakaway.
He had done something similar in training camp to spring Emil Heineman on a breakaway, and I was wondering if there was an origin story to this pass, because it is very unique.
“I used to do it in youth hockey all the time,” Hutson said last week. “But it’s actually hard to do in college, you can’t really catch guys breaking as often. But in this league guys are pretty smart and they’re just going and you can hit them in space, so you can lead a pass. So it’s kind of different in that sense.
“And you’ve got to take into account that teams are trying to play us tight and gap up, so if they miss their gap, it’s easy to make that lob pass. But in college, teams will sit back, so there’s no lob to be made.”
It’s basically similar to playing against a press cornerback in football and beating him off the line of scrimmage for a deep ball versus a corner who gives a bigger cushion and therefore is less susceptible to it.
And then there’s the risk-reward calculation that goes into it as well.
“It’s a low-risk play because no one’s getting it, so I just hope my guy gets it. By the time (the puck) gets down, we’ll have guys in position anyways,” Hutson said. “But nothing too crazy about it. I just go with my instincts a little bit, it’s been there a few times and I just try to make that play.”
Slafkovský’s snarky goal “celebrations”
Juraj Slafkovský had a front-row seat to Patrik Laine’s last two power-play goals, as he was posted at the net front on both. And his celebration of each goal was, well, targeted.
PATRIK SUPÉRIORITÉ LAINE
PATTY POWER PLAY #GoHabsGo pic.twitter.com/eTKwHX1U8i
— Canadiens Montréal (@CanadiensMTL) December 21, 2024
That was the goal in Detroit and Slafkovský was barking at someone on the Red Wings, which you only get a quick glimpse of at the end of the video. Turns out it was Moritz Seider, whose stick was sawed in half by Laine’s shot on what turned out to be the game-winning goal.
“Well, they yell at me every shift, every shift they’re trying to slash me and everything. So I’m yelling back and they think I’m a bad guy or something,” Slafkovský said after the game Saturday. “I was just doing what they are doing.”
Then he added, “Today as well, I don’t know if you saw that.”
Yes, after Laine scored Saturday night from that same spot, Slafkovský was at it again.
PETIT PATTY NOËL! #GoHabsGo pic.twitter.com/uHWZbKLQve
— Canadiens Montréal (@CanadiensMTL) December 22, 2024
Was he not pointing at Laine to tell him he had just scored?
“Um, almost,” Slafkovský said with a smile. “I was pointing at the guy who scored the goal.”
That would not be Laine, in this instance. He was referring to Red Wings defenceman Ben Chiarot, who deflected the pass into his own net before it could ever get to Slafkovský.
Wouldn’t it be fun to see this kid in a playoff series one day?
When demotion feels like a promotion
When Laine came back to the Canadiens lineup, Kirby Dach lost his spot on the top power play unit: yet another setback in a season full of them for Dach.
Except in this case, the hope is to have this demotion be more positive.
Since moving to the second unit, Dach has touched the puck far more often than he ever did on the top unit, where he seemed a bit lost without a clearly defined role. Now, the second unit essentially works through Dach because he is set up on the left side at the half wall, with left-shot one-timer options available to him in Mike Matheson up top, Alex Newhook in the bumper and Emil Heineman in the opposite circle.
And even though he’s only getting the final 30 seconds or so of each power play, Dach said he’s coming out of power plays with more puck touches than he was before.
“The more you touch the puck,” he said, “the more confident you’re going to be.”
That confidence hasn’t really translated to Dach’s five-on-five play just yet, but Dach said he’s enjoying the new assignment.
And that, coach Martin St. Louis said, was the plan all along.
“That was the goal with Kirby going on the other unit and having the puck run through him and being able to collect the puck in space and having your eyes up. I think it trains your brain a little bit for your five-on-five game,” he said. “You’re not going to have that time all the time, but there are times at five-on-five where you should feel it’s almost a power-play moment. I think it helps them, they touch the puck more. That was definitely the goal with Kirby.”
The goal remains elusive, but it will be worth monitoring.
Brendan Gallagher’s level of belief in the Canadiens hasn’t been higher in a long time. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
Confirmation of the veteran narrative
Last Tuesday morning, before facing the Buffalo Sabres, St. Louis was asked about the Canadiens’ rebuild because, considering the team he was about to face, of course he was.
The crux of what St. Louis said was that his veterans accepted the Canadiens’ rebuild and helped get the team’s young players through the development phase; now it was on those developed young players to return the favour and help those veterans win. The fact he is getting such consistent performances from his veterans, he said, showed their belief that something good that is about to come out of it.
As soon as he said it, the first name that came to mind was Brendan Gallagher. His current contract kicked in immediately following the Canadiens’ trip to the Stanley Cup Final in 2021, and it’s been nothing but downhill for the entirety of that contract. His own play dipped significantly, and the team’s did as well.
Now Gallagher is playing much better, and the team, well, that’s a work in progress.
“I think where we’re at, what have we played, 30 games, 31? So we would have hoped to be higher up in the standings. That goes without saying,” he said. “I think we had expectations to be closer at this point. But we have a lot of confidence. We feel like we can string wins together and find a way to claw our way back.”
That was Wednesday after practice. At the time, the Canadiens were coming off stringing one win together. They hadn’t strung more than two together all season. When this was pointed out to him, Gallagher couldn’t really disagree, but he said he believed it would happen.
And that belief is important, just as St. Louis had mentioned a day earlier.
“It has to happen at some point, and before it happens, there’s a process that goes into it, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” Gallagher said. “When you believe in the thing, you have to see it through. And I think we have a lot of belief. We haven’t gotten the results, but we feel the answers are here and we’re going to continue to work to that.”
That very evening, the Canadiens acquired Carrier from Nashville for Justin Barron, a sign from management they shared Gallagher’s belief.
Then the Canadiens added a second and then a third win to their string.
Their schedule after Christmas is treacherous; the Canadiens will face one team that is currently out of a playoff spot over their first 11 games coming out of the break, with eight of those games on the road. It’s an unlikely time to be stringing wins together.
But sometimes, belief can go a long way.
Happy holidays!
The weekly notebook will be taking a little break for the holidays, so you will not be seeing it until the new year. I will be away from the team as they embark on their annual holiday season road trip and therefore won’t be able to gather the additional nuggets used to populate this weekly piece. I will be writing other things between now and then, but the notebook won’t be back until Jan. 13. I’d like to wish all of our readers the happiest of holidays.
(Top photo of Kaiden Guhle: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
