Slump-busting win over Maple Leafs Canadian recipe to follow

MONTREAL – With just over three minutes to play in the first period of the game, the Montreal Canadiens are leading 2-0 when Mike Matheson starts a breakout.

Florian Shikaj and Josh Anderson criss-cross through the dots, Jake Evans fills the next lane, and eventually Matheson joins those three and defensive partner Noah Dobson in the neutral zone and knocks back the five Toronto Maple Leafs ahead of him. He sees that everyone is moving north and instead of trying to make a tape-to-tape pass to one of them, he lobs the puck into Toronto’s end from his side of the center.

Matheson made two quick calculations on this sequence, and both were correct: that the risk of a pass and turnover in that situation far outweighed the possibility of a pass and rush opportunity, and that the Canadiens had enough speed to deny the puck if they turned it inside.

Now, that might seem like the most vanilla thing to focus on after a Napoleonic game that saw the Canadiens score five goals, but it’s at the heart of why they won for the first time in two weeks.

Alignments like those will also be the foundation of this team’s success if it is to enjoy as much as it plans to do over the next 61 games.

“We didn’t make turnovers tonight,” Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis said.

It would be more accurate to say the Canadiens didn’t produce the kind of valuable stuff that sent St. Louis into a rare rage after Thursday’s 8-4 loss to the Washington Capitals.

He left the Bell Center that night intending to address Canadians as he addressed the media — with harsh truth. Then Friday came, and the message was delivered on the ice (for what he said was the most intense practice he’d put his team through all season), and then off, during a team meeting where no emotion was spared.

“It wasn’t fun,” Matheson said, “but sometimes that’s what it takes to fix things.”

That’s what losing seven of eight games — and that last one in embarrassing fashion — calls for.

Still, the message must be right, and it helps to reinforce it with video.

Then, the room at the Canadiens’ practice facility opened up, and every player in it started talking about managing the media — the score, the clock, the puck — and showing off some of the maturity they’d worked so hard to build over the past three seasons.

St.Louis said Saturday morning’s focus was on eliminating neutral zone turnovers, or as he put it, “the biggest actions that help the other team.”

Mathieson wasn’t the only one who listened, but his actions with just over three minutes left in the first period will serve as a perfect example of when they can come back when they need a reminder of what happens when you calculate your path on the ice.

St. Louis said not doing that against Washington prevented his team from scoring effectively long enough.

But against the Leafs, from start to finish, the Canadiens pretty much had it.

Before what Matheson did late in the first, the Canadiens had committed just two neutral zone turnovers.

Then he threw the puck in, Evans caught it, and the Canadiens set up 90 straight seconds of offensive zone pressure.

En route to a 5-2 win, they committed just two other neutral zone turnovers — one late in the first, and one dominant in the second.

No help in the third as the Canadiens closed out the win.

“It can be boring, but that’s what works in the moment,” Matheson said. “We talked between the second and third and said it wasn’t a game where we needed seven goals. It was more important to keep it simple and boring.”

Plain and boring produced most of the wins the Canadiens earned last season en route to an unexpected playoff berth. Simple and boring contributed to a 9-3-0 start this season, at a time when other teams were weak and just working their way up.

But simple and boring has become a difficult recipe for the Canadiens to follow, with young talent inspiring and emerging, and with goals that are yet to fill the net for opponents.

It became a necessary recipe to get back, though, to avoid filling their bellies as late as they were.

The saves Jacob Dobbs needed to help him against Toronto, no doubt.

But the Canadiens managed it the way they needed to, keeping it out of their end for 38:55 and the Leafs’ end for 26:01, according to SportLogiq, which also calculated that their time of possession is nearly double that on offense.

“Our forwards did a good job of playing that two-man game, putting pucks in good spots, and they made it tough on their D all night,” said Noah Dobson, who scored two of Montreal’s goals.

One of them started a beautiful rush play that started with Joraj Slafkowski and passed to Ivan Demidov.

Everything else came with hard work and intensity, whether it was Xhekaj, who scored his first NHL point in his first NHL game (Josh Anderson scored the first of two) or Len Hutson, who finished a game that included a perfect puck arrangement for Montreal’s first goal.

What happened between that and Anderson’s empty pitcher was St. Louis selling his team for just over 24 hours.

“I always say my main job is to convince people,” Koch said. “As a leader, you have to convince people to do things a certain way…”

When the Canadiens watch the tape of it, they will see that it was built on all of Matheson’s random plays in the first round.

It might not be as exciting as some of the videos they’ve been watching of late, but it sure would be a lot of fun.