Heroes of '86: Bobby Smith

                                   

    Like sand through the hourglass...

    It's hard to believe it's been forty years since the Canadiens sent an inexperienced team featuring ten rookies, including their starting goalie, into the playoffs with very few expectations. Looking back at that lineup now can remind us how anything can happen in the post-season, especially when the stars align and the ghosts come out.

    The things that team accomplished are proof of what a young team with ambition can do and it's a good example for today's players who've yet to put their historic stamp on their historic team. The memories of that run show today's players what's changed in Montreal...and what will always stay the same.

    Most Habs fans of a certain age recall May 5, 1986 with more than a touch of fond nostalgia. It was Game Three, Habs versus Rangers in the conference finals of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The Canadiens had won the first two games, so Game Three was, by no means, a do-or-die contest. It was, however, a game of Meaning in Habs' lore. Canadiens fans remember it as the beginning of Patrick Roy's metamorphasis into the original butterfly superstar. The 20-year-old rookie goalie faced 13 Rangers' shots in OT stopping them all, many spectacularly. He held his team in it until New York's James Patrick bumped a linesman and took himself out of the play, allowing Claude Lemieux enough of a break to bury the winner. That's what most Habs fans will remember about that night. Bobby Smith, the lanky, silky-handed centreman on the Canadiens top line at the time, recalls something other than Roy's and Lemieux's heroics.

      "My memory of that game is tying it up with about a minute left, so I have a different memory of it than most other people," Smith laughs.

    A look back at the box score from that night proves his sense of recall is still pretty sharp four decades after the fact. The Rangers were up 3-2 and took a penalty with about three-and-a-half minutes to go. With eight seconds left in the PP and 2 minutes in the period, Smith tipped a Larry Robinson shot behind John Vanbiesbrouck and set the stage for Patrick Roy's command performance.

    The goal was typical of the very good, but understated...some would say underappreciated...player Smith was in his seven seasons as a Hab. In that Cup year, for example, he scored 31 goals and 86 points, but played second fiddle to Mats Naslund's 110 points. In 1988, Smith put up his best numbers in Montreal with 93 points, but the Habs lost out to Boston in the post-season and a great year was forgotten. The truth, though, is that Naslund would never have had his best season without Smith. And a player who was nearly a point-a-game through more than a thousand NHL games shouldn't be forgotten.

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    Bobby Smith arrived in Montreal in 1983, shortly after requesting a trade from the Minnesota North Stars. The Stars had hired a new coach with a different philosophy and Smith wanted a change of scenery. In this age of "Codes" and strange notions of what constitutes "respect," players are villified for asking to be traded. Smith thinks that's unfair.
    "I used to always say it's the best job in the world except you spend too much time in the dentist chair and you don't get to choose where you live," he quips.
    When he got the word that the trade to Montreal went through, the kid who grew up in nearby Ottawa was delighted.
    "I can still remember the surreal feeling of my first practice with the Canadiens, and skating around and looking at my reflection with the CH on my chest in the glass," he recalls. "I always thought if you played baseball, you should play a few years with the Yankees, or football with the Dallas Cowboys. It's the same thing with the Canadiens. It was special in Montreal. I thought it was the centre of the hockey universe. Game night was a big special occasion. We played at about 107 percent of capacity most nights. There was a serious attitude there that was a surprise, even coming from a good team like Minnesota."
    Smith says some of his most cherished hockey memories come from his time in Montreal, including what was, for him, the greatest moment of the 1986 Stanley Cup finals.
    "No question. Being on the bench as the clock ticked down against Calgary. The score was 4-3 and the puck went across our blueline and you knew it was over. That was the moment. It wasn't clear until that moment that we were going to win the Stanley Cup, but I remember that moment very well," he says. He modestly neglects to mention that he was the one who scored the Cup-winning goal for the Habs, converting a Naslund feed about halfway through the third.
    "For a point during my career,it was like that was a thing guys on other teams got to do," he continues. "For a while, the Islanders had three of the best six or seven players in the world and they kept winning. Then the OIlers seemed like they were going to win every year. It seemed that winning the Stanley Cup was something other teams did. Then all of a sudden, I was playing for the Montreal Canadiens and we weren't the best team in the league, as we may have been in '89, and we won."

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    Ah, yes. Eighty-nine. "The year that should have been" for many Canadiens fans who've never gotten over watching the best team in the league lose in the finals, while Lanny McDonald skated the Cup around Forum ice. Fortunately for Bobby Smith's peace of mind, however, he's able to put that loss in perspective.
    "I played in 35 playoff series during my career. It's a tremendous accomplishment to win a playoff series," he explains. "It's far different from beating a team in the regular season, where you play a team on October 13, then you play them again on December 5. When you play against each other every second night and your team wins, that's a major accomplishment. Even at the end of a season, if you've won three playoff rounds and lost in the final, when the disappointment wears off, you say, hey, we won three playoff rounds. We're a good team."
    The Canadiens were a good team in the '80s, and Bobby Smith was a big part of the club's success. Eventually, though, he decided it was time to move on. The Habs were bringing in younger centres and he could see a shrinking role in his future. He once again took control of his own hockey fate and asked for a trade back to Minnesota. He finished his last three years in the NHL back in the city where it all began. When the end came, he had no regrets.
    "I was completely ready for it. I feel bad for the guys who leave and really have a tough adjustment," he muses. "Our final game was on a Sunday. I think I had a press conference on Tuesday. I was not a good player in my last year in the league, which made it a lot easier. I was a full-time student at the University of Minnesota and I did that for three years. So I never had a single day where I looked back and said, Oh, I wish I were still playing."

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    Of course, Bobby Smith and hockey have never been very far apart. The 1979 first-overall draft pick and Calder Trophy winner, who still holds the OHL single-season scoring record, is deeply involved in junior hockey. He was the majority owner of the QMJHL's Halifax Mooseheads for 20 years.

    "I enjoyed it. I had a lot of experiences to pass on to those guys. I liked being around it all the time."
     He lives in Arizona these days, where he moved when he took over as GM of the NHL's Coyotes after completing his B.S. and MBA degrees in 1996, but he makes several trips a year to catch his team in action and stay abreast of the daily details.
    On December 4, 2010, management invited the hundred players who contributed most to its century of success to come back for the big party. The official photo from the night shows Bobby Smith, the tallest guy in the back row, proudly wearing the CH one more time. He says the night was special, almost as though he never left.
    "That's a bond that's always there, with those guys who you spend so much time with," Smith reminisces. "There are certain friends who you don't need a lot of time to reconnect very easily, so that hundredth anniversary was a lot of fun. If you're going to play a few years in the NHL, it's a treat to spend some of them in Montreal."

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    Smith says now he also received one of the best pieces of advice he ever got when he played for the Habs, but it didn't come from a coach or teammate. Even in the '80s, before the internet-fuelled obsessions of the new millenium, the Canadiens were the living competitive heartbeat of Montreal. Fans would gather outside the Forum before and after every practice and game, in the hope of making contact with their heroes. After one particularly bad night, Smith recalls being in no mood to greet the people who wanted to talk about what went wrong. His wife, Beth, caught his arm as they were about to walk out of the building.
    "She said, these people will see you for two minutes and you will never see them again. If you make a bad impression, they'll remember that for the next twenty-five years," Smith laughs. "She was right."
    Bobby Smith made very few bad impressions in his NHL career. While he remembers Montreal fondly, forty years after he watched the clock tick down on a Habs Stanley Cup victory, Canadiens fans remember him with a smile as well.

The Right Recipe

   

      Cooking and baking are very different things. When you cook, you can be creative. You can add a little extra of this or a little less of that and it doesn't fundamentally change the dish. When you bake, however, you're less an artist and more a scientist. Baking is precise. If you know how ingredients work on a scientific level, then you’ll likely know when to add flour to provide more structure or eggs to act as a leavening agent. You'll know how much baking powder to add to get your cake to rise properly and how to work a dough so it doesn't get tough.

    The thing is, even when you follow a recipe exactly, outside factors, like oven temperature, the material of your baking dish; sometimes even the composition of the water you add can affect the outcome. Experienced bakers learn to know their own equipment and what to expect from it.

    If you apply the kitchen metaphor to hockey, the regular season is cooking with lots of adjustments to taste. It's a time to experiment and try bold things. The playoffs are baking. They require chemistry, diligence and attention to detail. Sometimes the temperature of a game impacts the final product and the mixture has to be just right.

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    The first thing you do as a baker is check your ingredients and make sure you have everything you need. In the playoffs, a winning recipe needs just the right pieces. There must be skill for scoring goals, discipline to stay out of the penalty box, grit to win puck battles and physical confrontations, hockey sense to avoid costly mistakes, a reliable goalie and, perhaps most importantly, heart. A player with heart, who's willing to do whatever it takes to win, is the secret ingredient in making a champion.

    When Martin St.Louis looks at the tape of the second game against Tampa, he'll be looking for the missing ingredient in the playoff mix. What made the Canadiens completely fall apart in OT? Perhaps Kirby Dach's laconic loss of his man was the glaring mistake that cost the game, but he wasn't the only one looking tentative and tight in overtime.

    An infusion of heart might have made a difference. Perhaps someone more dogged than Dach would have worked harder to be in a better defensive position on that play. And nobody in Montreal is as dogged as Brendan Gallagher.

    Sure, Gally's not the player he was when he was 20. He's not as fast and not as consistent a pest as he used to be. His finish around the net isn't quite as good. But that's in the regular season when precision isn't necessarily the goal. This is the playoffs. Gallagher knows his career is winding down. He wants to win a Stanley Cup before he retires and he will sacrifice whatever it takes to make that happen while he still can.

    A player like Dach or Zachary Bolduc might be physically bigger, but they often don't play like it. So St.Louis has to decide if his recipe needs a more active ingredient. With Gallagher, he knows he's getting heart, net presence and determination to prove himself one more time. That's a potent combination at this time of year.

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    Josh Anderson is, perhaps, the perfect model of what a real playoff competitor looks like. He uses his speed and size to disrupt the opponent, and his banging, crashing play has helped him produce desperately-needed goals. Nobody can sustain that level of intensity and aggression for a full season, so Anderson paces himself until it's really needed. He levels up in the post-season.

    That's what the other players who are in the lineup for their size and ability have to learn. You can't just continue what you did in the regular season. That was cooking time. Now it's time to bake, and players like Gallagher bring just what the chef ordered.

Catching Up With the Little Viking

 

    When Cole Caufield joined the NHL's 50-goal club this month, he was carrying on a legacy. Caufield's coach, Martin St.Louis, has molded him into a compact scoring machine, playing a similar game to St.Louis himself. The two are physical dopplegangers. 

    They're both physically similar to St.Louis' hockey hero and the last Canadien to put up a hundred points before Nick Suzuki matched it this season, Mats Naslund. You might say Caufield plays the way he does partly because of Naslund and his influence on St.Louis.

    Now, on this fortieth anniversary of the Canadiens 1986 Stanley Cup win, we can still see the impact Naslund had on their coach and their top goal scorer.

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    It is approximately 5825 kilometres from Montreal to Höllviken, Sweden. The multicultural Canadian city and the small, Swedish beachside town have little in common, save that they've both been home to Naslund.
    He arrived at the Montreal Canadiens' training camp in the fall of 1982, three years after becoming the first European player drafted by the Habs. He went in the second round, 37th overall. Unlike future teammate, Guy Carbonneau who was chosen seven picks later, Naslund wasn't exactly comfortable with the news he'd be going to Montreal.

    "Well, there was not too many players from Europe drafted at that time, so I guess, first of all, you wanted to get drafted by a team that had other Swedish players like the Islanders," he recalls with amusement. "I was the first Swedish guy and the first European to get drafted by Montreal, so that was kind of a big thing. The language was another big thing. Learning the French language, I never did. I had enough with English the first couple of years. Sometimes I felt a little stupid, but otherwise I could understand everybody."
    By the time Naslund made his way from Sweden to Montreal he had a wife and baby. The adjustment to a new country, language and hockey league was huge, but made a lot easier by the intervention of the Canadiens captain.
    "Bob Gainey, the captain, took care of me from the start. I owe him a lot for helping me adapt to North America," he acknowledges. "He took care of me and he took care of my family when they got there. First, when I got to training camp, I stayed at his house with his family. Then, when I made the team, he looked at ads in the papers for an apartment, and he helped me with that, and getting a car. He pretty much took care of me the first year. I don't think he was assigned by the team. He would have done that anyway, even if he wasn't the captain. He's just that kind of guy."
    Naslund says he learned something about how to behave off the ice from Gainey's actions. He thinks successful teams must have guys like Gainey, and years later, when he became the architect of national teams in his own country, he remembered the lessons his old Habs captain taught.
    "You need role models on the team. The coaches can only do so much, but I think the most important thing is to have teammates to take care of you and show you how to do it," he says.
    Of course, nobody talks about Mats Naslund without mentioning the most noticeable thing about him. He wasn't called "Le Petit Viking" for nothing. At a generous 5'7" and 160lbs, it was a rare interview in which he wasn't asked about his size. The smaller players today, like Caufield and Lane Hutson, patiently answer questions about their lack of height while insisting their skills speak for themselves. Naslund was fiercely proud of being a player who succeeded within the body he was given. In that sense, he's become a role model.
    "I was a pioneer for smaller players," he states. "I'm very proud when I hear Martin St.Louis tell the media I was his idol. Of course I'm proud of what I did."
    What he did was merely become the highest-scoring Canadiens forward since Guy Lafleur. His 110-point season in 1985-86 hasn't been matched since. He led the team in scoring en route to the '86 Cup and posted five assists in the 1988 All-Star game while playing on a line with Mario Lemieux. He was a member of the 1983 All-Rookie team and won the Lady Byng trophy in 1988. He's still 12th all-time in scoring for the Canadiens. In accomplishing what he did, he proved a little guy can be a star at the highest levels of hockey, if he's only given a chance. He says the best advice he's got for small players isn't actually for them. It's for their coaches.
    "They should be patient and give those guys a fair chance when they're fourteen or fifteen," he attests. "Don't put them aside because of the bigger guys. I think that's the toughest time for young players in hockey. If you make it through junior hockey, you're all set."

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    Naslund was never an overly sentimental guy. He played his heart out and his devotion to his team was unquestioned, but the perils of making a living by strength of arm and sharpness of eye were never far from his mind. After eight years with the Canadiens, he weighed his options and chose to leave Montreal.

    "The main reason was that I played half the amount of games for the same money. I felt if I had played eight years and didn't get serious injuries, I should be able to play another four or five years in Europe for the same amount of money. So that's why I left," he says, matter-of-factly.
    He's just as matter-of-fact, if a little sheepish, when asked about his brief return to the NHL in a hated Bruins sweater four years later.
    "For the money," he laughs. "I had respect for the teammates there, like Ray Bourque and Cam Neely and those players. But playing in Montreal, Boston was never the favourite team. I don't really have a good comment on that one."
    The NHL return lasted half a season, then Naslund hung up the skates for good. He went home to his little seaside Swedish town, and, with detours to manage Sweden's national hockey team and coach a bit, he's planted deep roots there. He spends his days doing all the things he couldn't do when he followed his sport halfway around the world.
    "I'm working part time as a carpenter building houses. I did that before I came to Montreal. I work with a friend, and there are only four of us, so it's a small company. So basically, that's what I'm doing half the time," he says, audible satisfaction in his voice. "In the other time, I work with horses. I'm a trotting fan. I play a little bit of golf. I basically have a very good life."
    He makes time in his good life to catch a Habs game or two ("If they're lucky enough to have a game on Sunday afternoon I watch, but I don't sit up in the middle of the night watching.") He still counts himself a Canadiens fan, and his greatest hockey memory, in a career of many, is of riding down St.Catherine's St. on a spring day in 1986.
    "The parade we had in Montreal, with a million or more people, that's the thing I remember most from my eight years in Montreal. I don't think you would get that anywhere else. Winning the Cup if you play in Minnesota or Tampa is good. Winning it in Canada is unbelievable."

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    Watching these days, Naslund says he sees differences in the game since he last played. The crackdown on holding and hooking penalties makes him think he'd probably have done pretty well if the rules in his day had been so kind to offensive players. The physical condition of the players, he says, is the biggest overall change. As for the shootout? He's not a fan.
    "I think it's good for the fans, so I think we have to respect it for the fans' sake," he muses. "I don't like it. It's not really fair. At my early years, I would have been very good at it. But in the end, I wouldn't have had the guts to score a lot of goals on the penalty shots. With age you get more nervous. When you're young, you don't really care."

    Watching...and remembering...is about the only connection Naslund has to the game these days. He's living the life he wants, and, for now, hockey is part of his past.

    "I'm not involved in hockey right now, and I don't know if I want to be involved again or if I want to stay outside," he says honestly. "We will see next year. I appreciate being home this spring. I've been gone for years in April and May. You have to make that decision sometime. I think there are other things in life than hockey."
    Mats Naslund has found he enjoys many other things in life as he and his wife Eva happily await the arrival of grandchildren. He's settled in another world from the one he inhabited as a Montreal Canadien. Still, 5825 kilometres away from his home in Höllviken, a city of hockey fans will always remember him for the way he played the game we love.

    All you have to do is watch Cole Caufield.

    And what does Naslund himself think of Caufield's game?

    "Nice touch, nice one-timer. Small guy. Too small to play hockey."

    Then he smiles.

Confidence Men

    When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things. -Joe Namath

    Mr.Namath was talking about playing for the New York Jets in the '60s, but he very well could have been talking about the Montreal Canadiens in 2026. The young Habs players are doing amazing things and having a ton of fun. It all goes back to confidence...having it, building it and maintaining it. And that can be traced in part to the coach.

    Dr.Cal Botterill is a sports psychologist (and dad of Jennifer and Jason) who's worked with NHL teams for years.

    "It is so important. I mean, you can be a demanding coach and sometimes that's part of being good, but you've got to be careful with it especially with young people," he says. "It it is such a special situation in Montreal. I love Marty (St.Louis) and I think he's just an amazing young coach and he was a great teammate.  And he's building with his caring nature. I mean, watch him coach. He's got his hand on their shoulder. He's speaking right in their ear. He's chatting with them. He's relating, you know, and they're coming out as young players and playing like this. I mean, it is magic."

    Botterill has been around long enough to know not every coach is a confidence-builder like St.Louis.

    "I remember dealing with Mike Keenan," he recalls. "I said for Christ's sake, Mike, stay out on the ice after practice and the rookie kid out there, he's just, I knew he was hurting. Go there I said. Twenty minutes later they come in. They're both grinning from ear to ear. You know, I said, those kids don't need any more crap. And he comes to me 10 minutes later and said thank you, I want you to always tell me what you think we need to do, not what I want to hear."

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    Players, coaches and fans know you have to have confidence to play your best at such a high level.  The problem is, confidence can be ephemeral; destroyed more easily than it's built. Botterill says a lot of it comes from early experiences. If a player grows up with supportive parents and coaches, he or she is more likely to be confident. Other than that, he says the most important thing in developing confidence is belief. And if a player doesn't believe in him or herself, it can help tremendously when someone else believes in them. If Marty St.Louis believes they can do a thing, soon the player starts to believe it too.

    There are other, concrete ways to develop confidence as well.

    "Music is powerful," Botterill explains. "A lot of athletes will have their headphones on for a couple of their favorite songs and and there we go. And you mix highlight videotape of players on your team. We did this in Chicago and put a soundtrack on it. A little good piece of music, you can turn them from being the most depressed team to the most positive."

    Good habits are important too, he says.

    "Physiology first, you can never forget. You have to have a decent lifestyle. You have to hydrate, you have to have good nutrition. And a lot of even high-performance people still neglect that a bit and they wonder why things slip in terms of confidence when you haven't treated yourself well."

    Botterill believes players need to work on their confidence the same way they work out in the gym.

    "There's four ways. That's what you're doing, what you're thinking, what you're feeling and your physical shape," he says. "If you get feeling better about something with your music or if you have eaten the right things and hydrated with water, you're going to have energy and that will translate into confidence."

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    When a player loses confidence, it can have long-term effects. Careers have ended because talented players don't believe in themselves. For guys who have it and are performing well, like Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Lane Hutson, it's not a difficult message for St.Louis to deliver.

    However, when a guy like Patrik Laine or Samuel Montembeault is parked for long periods of time, it's a harder sell. 

    "The wrong thing happening again can kill it sometimes," warns Botterill. "And it really hurts people if they make a mistake that they felt bad about or didn't go the way they thought or whatever. And if they've had trauma somewhere in their life, it's very easy to go back to that."

    Fortunately, St.Louis knows that too. And he knows how to communicate it to all his players, in the lineup or not.

    "It starts with honesty," he says. "There are days when they won’t be happy about all the things I tell them but it’s my truth. I’m thinking often about the person they will become and not the person they are today. It takes honesty to bring a person to that point. It’s part of coaching. It’s not just about teaching, it’s building relationships and confidence. I think they know I have their best interest at heart. It’s always about the person they will become, the player they will become, not the player they are today.”

    St.Louis will win the Jack Adams Trophy as coach of the year one day.

    We can be confident in that.

    

The Warrior

    

    When Trevor Timmins took the stage at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles on day two of the 2010 NHL entry draft, nobody paid much attention to his fifth-round pick. The big names...Taylor Hall, Tyler Seguin and Eric Gudbranson...had been feted on national television the day before and interest in the lower rounds was mainly from scouts and GMs who hoped to find a steal.

     Brendan Gallagher was a hustler for the Vancouver Giants back then. He stood (officially) at 5'9" and weighed 180 lbs, although he looked more like he was on his way to junior high school wearing his dad's suit. Despite his stature, he was coming off three consecutive 40+ goal seasons in the WHL. He was still a gamble for Timmins who spent his earlier picks on Jarred Tinordi in the first round and Mark MacMillan in the fourth. The Habs had no second or third-round picks that year. There weren't really great expectations for Gallagher as an NHL player.

    In 2010, most people would not have taken the bet that Gallagher would play fifteen years and 900 games (plus), put up two thirty-goal seasons and literally bleed for the Canadiens. It's a rare photo that doesn't show him with a cut on his cheekbone or lip. His feisty fearlessness earned him grudging respect from opponents who hated him...in a good way. Early on, he and Alex Galchenyuk were put together by the team...public appearances, rooms on the road and even a shared nickname. Everyone thought if one of the players ended up leaving the Habs, it'd be the fifth-rounder.

    As we now know, Galchenyuk flamed out spectacularly and is playing in the KHL. Gallagher has become the heart and soul of the Canadiens, willing to sacrifice whatever he must to help the team win.

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    In his earlier years, sacrifice meant blocking shots with his hands until they broke. It meant spending most of his shifts in the other team's blue paint, getting crosschecked, punched and speared. It meant taking a hit from Zdeno Chara and bouncing up with a shit-eating grin. Now, fifteen years in, sacrifice is more cerebral. In the last decade and a half, Gallagher has lost his mom and his hair. He's gotten married and has one-and-a-half kids. Goal scoring doesn't come as naturally or frequently as it used to do.

    Coach Martin St.Louis has scratched Gallagher twice recently, which had to be dispiriting for a player who thrives on competition and being part of the group. To his credit, he has chosen not to be a distraction. Where some veterans who feel underused or disrespected publicly complain or ask for a traade, Gallagher has chosen to be a cheerleader.

    "I'm comfortable with what I bring to this group. If my number is called, I know I can contribute. If not, you be a good team-mate and that's it," he told the media. "I'm grateful for the amount of time I've had in this city, I'm really fortunate for it. Obviously, I understand that you never know when you're going to get pushed out; I just try to take advantage of every opportunity that I have."

    The elder statesman of the Canadiens has seen this happen to teammates before. He watched Marc Bergevin nickel-and-dime Andrei Markov out of town. He saw his captain, Saku Koivu, leave Montreal after management decided not to offer him a new contract and his teammate Tomas Plekanec get traded to the Leafs. This is something he knew was coming for him at some point.

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    For a player who's given his body, mind and talent to his team, what he's doing now might be one of his biggest contributions to the Habs' future. He's going to smile and joke around with the kids he's mentored to take his place. He's going to be gracious and supportive and avoid becoming a distraction for his teammates.

    It can't be easy for him. The end of his career is on an ever-nearing horizon and draft day seems a hundred years ago. Nobody would blame him for mourning the upcoming tangible loss of his hockey dream.

    Yet, despite his personal pain, Gallagher is there for his team like he always has been. Fans can just hope all his dedication will pay off if he holds on long enough to be part of a Stanley Cup-winning Canadiens squad.

    Nobody really knew his name on draft day in 2010, but they certainly know it now. He's a fighter and a gentleman and one very fine Montreal Canadien. Even if he ends up watching this team win on television, his dedication, mentorship and team-first mentality helped create the culture that will carry the Habs far.

All Hail the House Elf

    

    Goalies are a different species from your average hockey player. Good ones can be tall or short, fat or thin, nervous or serene. They can have weird habits (Patrick Roy talked to his goalposts, Glenn Hall threw up before every game and Jacques Plante knit his own caps and socks. Gilles Gratton thought he was from outer space) or seem like the most average guy in the room. There is no perfect mold for the ideal goaltender.

    That's why drafting them is such a crapshoot.

    Three times in NHL history a goalie has gone first overall. Habs' pick Michel Plasse was the first in 1968 and he had an unremarkable career, bouncing around pro and semi-pro teams with a lifetime GAA of 3.79 and save percentage of 0.881. Then in 2000, the Islanders went wildly off the board taking Rick DiPietro first in the draft. His career was hampered by injuries, but he put up respectable numbers in his 319 NHL games. In 2003, the Penguins chose to spend the first pick on Marc Andre Fleury. Of course, Fleury has gone on to win three Stanley Cups, a Vezina Trophy and is a sure-fire Hall of Famer. Three goalies taken first overall with three very different career outcomes.

    To paraphrase Forrest Gump, with goalies you never know what you're going to get.

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    When the Canadiens drafted Carey Price fifth overall in 2005, everyone expected him to be a rock star. From early recognition as a WJC-winning goalie to a Calder Cup championship in Hamilton, Price found success everywhere he went. Even during the "Price vs. Halak" debates in 2010 then-GM Bob Gainey came to Price's defence, calling him a thoroughbred. Jaro Halak meanwhile, after carrying the Habs that playoff year, got traded away. You get a lot of do-overs when you're a talented goalie and a first-round draft pick.

    When the Canadiens drafted Jakub Dobes in 2020, the story was very different. He was a fairly unheralded Czech junior with good size and a toolbox full of unfished skills. He was still around in the fifth round when most NHL scouts are looking for long-term project potential and hope to strike gold. Nobody was really expecting much. Aside from Brendan Gallagher, picked in 2010, no Habs fifth-rounder has made much of an impression in the last twenty years.

    Dobes has been a more-than-happy surprise. In Price's first season, he played 41 games, won 24 and put up a 2.56 GAA and a .920 save percentage with three shutouts. So far this year, Dobes has played 38 games with 26 wins, a 2.73 GAA and .903 save percentage. Not too shabby for a fifth-round pick on a rebuilding team that's had defensive issues most of the year..

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    One of the criticisms the Canadiens face as they push for the playoffs is the risk they're taking of putting their hopes in a pair of rookie goalies. Fortunately, the team has a history of rookies shining in the post-season. Bill Durnan won the Cup and the Vezina in his first season in the NHL. Ken Dryden actually won rookie of the year after he won his first Cup and Conn Smythe Trophy. Patrick Roy played a huge role in winning the 1986 championship in his first season. Steve Penney dragged a mediocre Canadiens team through to the conference finals in 1984 with some great goaltending. So, no, Habs fans are not afraid of going into the first round with a pair of rookies in net.

    In fact, sometimes inexperience is a good thing. These guys don't know what is supposed to happen, so they just go with what is happening. It's all a big adventure right now, like WWI recruits heading off to whip the Huns and be home by Christmas, not realizing the reality of the trenches.

    The beauty of this is if Dobes should falter in the run up to the playoffs, or in the early rounds, the Canadiens have Jacob Fowler. He's the guy Price says reminds him of him. He's going to be a star goalie too. So yeah, Habs fans are not scared of rookie goalies.

    The thing with goalies is you never know what you're going to get, but sometimes you end up with a Faberge when you thought you had a Cadbury egg. It may be possible the Canadiens have two of them.

    

Purity

   

    "Real men don't score empty-net goals." That was long-time NHL defenceman Al Iafrate's response when a reporter asked him why he passed up an easy scoring opportunity and knocked the puck into the corner instead. (Although his actual language may have been rather less than politically correct.)

    "I don't like gimmes," said Brett Hull after he scored 86 goals in the 1990-91 season without putting one in the empty net.

    And Rocket Richard, the first player to score 50 goals in 50 games did so without any gimmes at all. In fact, when he became the first player to record 500 goals in his career, he still had never scored an empty-net goal. When he retired with a lifetime total of 544, all of them had been against a goalie.

    Now the Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy is the NHL's award for the most goals scored in a season;  named after perhaps the purest goal scorer in league history. A Canadiens player has never won it since its introduction in 1999.

    That could change this year.

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    Cole Caufield has 47 goals with eight games to go in the regular season. Like the Rocket, he's never scored an empty-net goal in his entire NHL career to date and he seems to be disinclined to start now. In the last game against Tampa, Nick Suzuki could easily have served up Caufield's 48th into an empty net, but decided to shoot it himself instead. Nobody seems to want to say out loud it's about Caufield preferring to score "pure" or "ethical" goals, but their actions say otherwise.

    Caufield may have the smile of a cherub but he's also got the stubbornness of hellhound. If he's decided he wants 50 goals without an empty-netter, he's likely going to be quietly determined to do it. It'll be interesting if it's Game 82 and he's got 49 goals, but he's got a few games to accomplish his mission before it gets to that point.

    The beautiful symmetry of Richard recording the first-ever 50-goal-season without an EN goal and Caufield doing the same thing to become the first Canadiens player to win the Richard trophy is pure art.

    Some around the league are raising the question of whether empty-net goals should even count for the Richard trophy, as the man himself never scored one. If those weren't counted, Caufield would be two goals ahead in the race for the lead. Colorado's Nathan MacKinnon has 50, but five of those were without a goalie.

    That's all conjecture, though it's an interesting thought. Empty-net goals do count, and that's unlikely to change. But it says something about the personality of the player to not only want to meet his goal, but to accomplish it in his own way. 

    Juraj Slavkovsky has said his Canadiens' teammates will be looking for Caufield every chance they get as they help him hit the 50-goal mark. They'd just better not expect him to go for the "gimme."

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    So what difference would it make if Caufield happened to add an empty-net tally to his total this year? For fans, none at all. Fifty goals are 50 goals and there'd be no asterisk in the record book if some of them were easier to bury than others. His 50 would be just as legitimate as MacKinnon's.

    For Caufield, though, we're seeing a young player challenge himself  to be better and live up to standards he sets in his own mind. His determination to do so is a reflection of what he expects of his level of play. That's something a coach can't teach or inspire in someone who isn't built that way to begin with.

    That's the kind of determination and self-set standard that wins Stanley Cups.

    And we know there are no "gimmes" in the playoffs.

    

    

The Dog and His Reflection

     

    A Dog, to whom the butcher had thrown a bone, was hurrying home with his prize as fast as he could go. As he crossed a narrow footbridge, he happened to look down and saw himself reflected in the still water below, as clearly as in a mirror. But the greedy Dog thought he was looking at another dog carrying a bone much bigger than his own.

    If he had stopped to think, he would have known better. But instead of thinking, he dropped his bone and lunged at the dog in the river, only to find himself swimming for his life to reach the shore. At last he scrambled out, and as he stood dripping and miserable on the bank, he realized what a fool he had been.

    His own bone was gone, carried away by the current. And the other dog and the bigger bone had never existed at all.  - Aesop

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    Lots of Canadiens fans...and those who eat up endless hours of airtime talking about the Canadiens... this season are on the same wavelength as Aesop's greedy dog.

    Their team hasn't won a Stanley Cup in 33 years. They haven't had a fifty-goal-scorer or a one-hundred-point producer in longer than that. Until this past spring and the arrival of Lane Hutson, no Habs player had won the Calder Trophy since Ken Dryden in 1972.

    This is a time to appreciate the team Montreal leadership is building. The Habs are young, fast and score a ton of goals. It's fun and exciting to watch them, knowing they'll never quit. It's joyful to see the players smile, and the little rituals of friendship that are the building blocks of a real winning team. Fans should be happy at last.

    So, to hear them complain about Martin St.Louis failing to coach a better defensive system, listening to them give up on this player or that one, or the need to trade Kaiden Guhle for a second-line centre is frustrating for fellow Habs supporters who want to feel good about their team.

    Since the trade deadline has passed, at least there are no more suggestions of signing Nazem Kadri or trading for Alexis Lafreniere. Still, though pundits like to go on about how Ivan Demidov is slumping and Mike Matheson is used too much. They talk about how the Habs aren't tough enough and without more size will do nothing in the playoffs. Or how going into the postseason with two rookie goalies is a bad idea. Or whether the team will be playing into the late spring at all. They're rehashing done deals like Logan Mailloux for Zach Bolduc as though their crystal balls are shinier than Kent Hughes'.

    

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    Critical fans, problematic management and overly-zealous media have chased players out of Montreal in the past. Patrick Roy. John LeClair. Jose Theodore. P.K.Subban. They booed Carey Price in preseason. Canadiens fans are tough on their team out of love, allegedly, but how can you love a team you seem to hate? 

    And why bother tossing speculation and judgement around? Hughes is not listening to you. Other Habs' GMs have succumbed to public pressure and jumped too unwisely on moves they should never have made (Scott Gomez, I see you there) but Hughes is made of different stuff. He's not going to be pushed into action by anybody outside his bubble. So critics who want to pick this roster apart should perhaps consider looking for a perfect team to support or report about instead of wasting their breath crapping on this one.

    The Canadiens are not perfect by a long shot. They have holes in the roster. They still have learning to do before they win it all. But they're growing up together and for fans who've been with them for the long haul, it's a joy to see. 

    If old Aesop taught us anything with his fable of the dog and his reflection it's that always craving the bigger, juicier bone means ignoring the bone you already have. And if you're not careful, you can end up with no bone at all.

    

    

The Belt

     

    When your kids are little, they're like sponges. They hear everything you say and their capacity to absorb knowledge is better than their diapers. They're sweet and funny and make you love them. In return, you teach them how to walk and talk, eat with a spoon, dress themselves and have manners. You show them how to be kind, how to share and how to cope with their big feelings. 

    Then, they start to grow up and you teach them about things like honesty, responsibility and graciousness. When they inevitably break the rules or act out, you send them to time out or you confiscate a favourite toy. You explain what they did wrong and why they need to learn not to do that again. You're a gentle, guiding hand.

    Suddenly, before you ever even register it's happened, they're teenagers. They develop ideas, values and opinions of their own and most of the time, they're not the same as yours. They roll their eyes when you advise them. They challenge you and demand to know why you set the standards you do. They know how to push your buttons and try your patience. Their mistakes grow in consequence too. Instead of writing on the wall or spilling an entire bag of flour, they're throwing parties that wreck your house and crashing your car. Sometimes they drive you around the bend and you yell at them. You may even go old-school and whip off your belt to snap it at them in frustration. 

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    The young Canadiens players have grown into metaphorical teenagers (some not too far off being actual teenagers.)  That means their coach/dad isn't treating them like toddlers any longer. Marty St.Louis expects the early, basic lessons to be ingrained by now. He wants to work on more advanced issues, so when players regress and start wetting the bed again it sorely triggers his temper. 

    In the Habs' last game against Detroit Alex Newhook had the misfortune of making the fatal error that caused that temper to fray. Like any dad who's just had enough of kids who don't listen and repeat the same mistakes, St.Louis lost his cool and snapped.

    In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that much...just a few shouted words and a bit of swearing. For St.Louis however, it was a departure and notable for that reason. Newhook could have been any of the Canadiens players who made a big mistake on an important play. He's certainly not alone in contributing to lost points this season, but he was the one in Marty's sights at that moment. It had to be embarrassing and a bit of a shock to the system to be on the receiving end of such a rare display by a coach everyone likes and admires. It was also a learning experience for the rest of the players who know they're lucky it wasn't them to draw coach's ire and will try extra hard to avoid the same treatment.

    More than momentary frustration on St.Louis' part, the incident underlined one important fact. The kids aren't kids anymore. Sure, they're the youngest team in the league, but they're also gaining experience in every single game. Their coach is becoming harder on them because their errors have bigger consequences now than when they weren't expected to crawl out of the basement as quickly as they have. 

    Now expectations have grown and the pressure to keep improving is real. As we've seen with the healthy scratches of Brendan Gallagher and Arber Xhekaj and the benching of Sam Montembeault, the coach is getting tougher in his decision-making. He's not the guy who carries the kids on his shoulders at the parade anymore. He's the dad of teenagers who need a little more tough love these days.

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    Fortunately, as the Canadiens continue to evolve and grow up, their coach really is an actual dad of teenagers. The same challenges facing his three growing sons face his evolving young players. And he's learning too. Just as a first-time dad grows with his kids, St.Louis is developing as a coach. A new dad doesn't have the tools to deal with teens. He learns how to teach and how to discipline as time goes on.

   St.Louis is well equipped to cope with the unexpected. He also has lots of patience...most of the time. When that patience is at an end, he's shown the kids are old enough to take it when he calls them out publicly and know they deserve it.

    The coach has been remarkable in his forbearance. St.Louis is a winner who's spent the last four-plus years clinging to patience, even though it eats him up to lose. He's about ready to move on from teaching to motivating. 

    For now he's yelling at them, but we (and they) have to expect he knows when and how to use the belt too.

Glass Houses

     

    Once upon a time, in a little town in Alberta, Kirby Dach was born on a freezing January day. The hockey gods looked fondly upon him and bequeathed to him three gifts. The first was the gift of size. As he grew to his full mass at 6'4" and 220lbs, he developed the frame he'd need to withstand the physicality of the NHL. The second was the gift of hands. The Chicago Blackhawks drafted him third overall because he proved in junior he can put the puck in the net, and set up his teammates effectively. The third gift was the gift of speed. NHL EDGE has him in the 95th percentile for maximum skating speed reaching 23.42 MPH in November of this season. 

    Though the gifts of the gods were generous and rich, they came with a curse. The ghosts of Maple Leafs past conspired to thwart the young player by giving him a glass skeleton. At first there were concussions. Then a broken ankle or wrist, and these weren't exactly breaks from crushing hits. Eventually it became apparent Dach could hurt himself buttering toast. The Blackhawks had enough of gluing him back together and Kent Hughes took him on as a reclamation project.

    In Montreal, Dach's woes have continued. The Glass Bone Curse has followed him and he's yet to play more than 70 games in a season at any level. With the Canadiens, his best season saw him lace up for only 58 games in 2022-23. The following season, he played just two.

    When he's in the lineup, Dach is noticeable for his gifts, but by the time he gets up to speed and starts to feel the game once more, the Curse strikes again. 

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    It's not easy for a body to absorb the punishment dished out over 82 games in an NHL season, plus preseason and playoffs. It's normal to sustain injuries and a lot of it in Dach's case is pure bad luck. He's not the first gifted Canadiens player to stand on the brink of "written off" because of injuries. Before Rocket Richard even reached the NHL he'd gained a reputation for being injury-prone. 

   In his first game with the Montreal Senior Canadiens (a team in the QSHL) in 1941, Richard crashed into the boards and suffered a broken ankle, missing the majority of the season. While still in the QSHL, he broke his wrist in 1942, which limited his play and hindered his progress. In his NHL rookie season with the Canadiens in 1943, he scored 5 goals in his first 16 games before suffering a broken leg that ended his debut season early. Even his own general manager, Tommy Gorman, thought Richard would never cut it as a pro hockey player because of his "brittle bones."

    In the early years of Serge Savard's career, he was beleaguered by broken bones too. In March of 1970, he crashed into the goalpost and shattered his left leg in five places. He spent months in a cast and underwent several surgeries. Ten months later, he broke the same leg again. And during practice for the 1972 Canada-Russia Summit Series, he broke his right ankle, which kept him out of games four and five.

     Like Richard before him, observers were skeptical Savard would last very long in the NHL. Seven Stanley Cups, a Hall-of-Fame career and a retired sweater proved them all wrong.

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    Both Savard and Richard eventually overcame the perception of their fragility. In Richard's case, after his disastrous rookie season, he devoted time in the summer to intense training to build up his muscle strength and help support his joints and bones. He had a breakout second season and was never overly sidelined again.

    Savard ended up changing his game entirely. His early impressive skating ability was hampered by the recurring leg injuries, so he turned his attention to becoming a stay-at-home defenceman. When paired with Larry Robinson or Guy Lapointe, Savard's play allowed them to join the rush. They owe him a lot for their own stellar careers.

    As for Dach, perhaps he's just unfortunate. Perhaps his bad luck is now in the past and he'll come back stronger from his latest upper-body injury. Or maybe he really is cursed. The thing is, if he doesn't follow the example of guys like Savard and Richard, he's soon going to run out of road in Montreal. Like his predecessors, he needs to work with the experts to find out why this keeps happening to him and how he can change his approach to prevent it.

    Michael Hage is coming soon. The Habs' lineup is already flush when everyone is healthy and there soon won't be a place for a guy who spends more time on the training table than on the ice. It was a great attempt by Hughes to give Dach a new start. Now the player will have to find a way to adapt and stay healthy.

    If he can't, all the gifts of the hockey gods don't matter. If he can't...the Curse will win.

Family Ties

   

     "When you're part of a team, there's a family spirit. You have to be understanding, respectful toward others, helpful towards people. I love helping people." -Martin St.Louis, August, 2025.

    "Every teammate will always be a brother to me." - Nick Suzuki, January, 2026

    The Canadiens have built their young team around the concept of family: loyalty, having each other's backs, supporting everyone as they work together to build a winner. In the beginning, four years ago, everyone bought into the concept. The up-and-coming players were just getting into the league all together, learning as they went. The team has grown and gelled as a unit, but now things are changing.

    When the players came in as beginners, it was easier to sell the idea of the team being a family. Now some have developed more quickly or farther than others. Some brothers are inevitably finding themselves looking in from the outside while others thrive.

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    There's been a lot of chatter in the last couple of weeks about the Habs' rebuild entering a new phase. With an entirely healthy roster, St.Louis has to make personnel decisions he'd rather not. Beyond that though, there's the delicate balance of emotion and pragmatism he's got to achieve within himself.

    St.Louis is a passionate guy who seems to genuinely care about his players. He's invested in their growth and development so it can't be easy for him on a personal level to park Sam Montembeault and Patrik Laine. He wants to give them every chance to improve and he's tried that. It's not working for them this season, and the coach has to put his emotion and his family feeling aside for the good of the team. It's not easy to tell a proud veteran like Brendan Gallagher he's sitting either. 

    It's going to get harder to push the "family" philosophy when some members get shoved aside.

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    In some ways, St.Louis is on just as steep a learning curve as his players. When he started, he was free to be patient with rookie mistakes, to have few expectations and to use his available players as he saw fit. With injuries, inexperience and general holes in the lineup, he didn't have much to lose. Now he's got experienced, healthy players and there's competition for jobs. Now his decisions are beginning to have real consequences for the players individually and the team as a whole. That carries a new level of pressure for the coach. It's fresh territory for him too.

    A lot will depend on how players deal with becoming spare parts, or just not needed at all. If they're able to keep that "family" feeling going, if they're able to smile even when they don't play. If players are unhappy they'll take away from the group feeling of wellbeing and when that happens, it creates tension that makes it harder to remain confident. Monitoring the team mood and ensuring nobody becomes a distraction will become more important a part of the coach's job.

    That's where Martin St.Louis' new challenge lies. It's not good enough to make the tough decisions about who to play and who to sit anymore. Now there's a level of emotional detachment he's going to have to develop in order to  avoid burning out in that department. It's a blessing to have a passionate coach, but he's going to have to moderate how invested he allows himself to be. And it will be harder to promote the family vibe when he maintains a professional distance.

    The balance will be tough to achieve because it can't be much fun to learn your family doesn't need you anymore. It's probably less fun to have to tell that to a kid you feel like you've raised to be an NHLer.

    When St.Louis masters the skills of diplomacy and managing disappointment he'll be an even better coach. If anyone can marry empathy with cold facts, it's probably him.

Poetic Justice

    

     Today the Montreal Canadiens have a problem they haven't faced in a very long time. They have a starting goalie the team can't trust. Sam Montembeault seems like a solid, likeable teammate. He's worked hard to make it as a guy for whom the NHL wasn't a given. Based on the play that won him a contract extension, he's been handed a very long leash by Martin St.Louis. Now though, he's taken up all the slack.

    Five times this season, Montembeault has given up a goal on the first shot of the game. That's nearly a quarter of all his starts this year. Sure, he's made some big saves but they lose any momentum they create when he gives up a stinker from the blue line right after. He gives up goals in the last minute of close games, and he gives up shorthanded goals. He blows leads regularly. His numbers are AHL-worthy.

    Montembeault hasn't just been bad this year, he's been poetically bad. He's been limerick bad:

    There once was a goalie named Monty

    Whose play in the net wasn't jaunty.

    When blowing a lead

    At breathtaking speed

    He saves fewer shots than my Aunty.

    He's been haiku bad:

    The team on the bench

    With disappointment watches

    The red light go on.

    He's been sonnet bad:

    In the glory days of Patrick and Ken

    The puck-stopping highlights and Hall of Fame.

    Their banners among the finest of men.

    Who wrote their own stories of the great game.

    The long line of luminous stars stood tall

    The team never worried about the net

    Guarding the cage an impenetrable wall.

    So cool under fire, never see them sweat

    Spring was the season for planning parades

    In the good old days, the usual route

    But even the greatest dynasty fades

    And the once ravenous throng becomes mute

    When the expected chain is broken down

    And disappointment shrouds the hopeful town.

    He's been ode bad:

    There was a time when goal was not in doubt.

    They passed the torch from hand to hand

    Never a drought

    Always rising to meet demand

    Standing tall whether squeaker or a rout

    It is not now as it has been of yore

    Security is gone

    Limits are drawn

    The things which we have seen we can see no more.

    

    There are some flashes sure

    But not a goalie's cure

    No guiding hand remains

    To hold the vessel steady on her course,

    Save what a mate attains

    Defend against the force

    All hope and glory his to earn

    From mediocrity and fear divorce.

    

    And of course, he's been epic bad, but we're not writing a book here. He might be good in the room, but as Scotty once said, "If he's good in the room, leave him there." It's time for St.Louis to take his predecessor's advice. 

    Montembeault is costing the Canadiens points. More concerning, he's costing them confidence. If a team is always thinking about helping out the goalie, the players aren't thinking enough about their own jobs. 

    There's no doubt the Habs' team defence is an issue as well, but it starts with the goalie. When you have a fragile goaltender, you have a fragile team. And when you're holding on to a wild card spot in an extremely tight division you can't afford fragility. Monty has had lots of chances to find his game this year, but hasn't been able to do so with consistency. It would be a crying shame if this good young team is kneecapped by lousy goaltending.

    It's time to give the keys to Jakub Dobes and ride him the rest of the way. There's no rhyme or reason for anything else.