Earlier in 2023-24, one prevailing narrative had been that the Montreal Canadiens had turned a corner on the power play. It’s safe to say that’s no longer true as the season draws to a close. In all honesty maybe it never was.
Shorthanded Goals Killing Canadiens
To be fair, the Canadiens’ power play is clicking at 17.6% overall. That’s the highest it’s been since 2020-21, when they reached the Stanley Cup Final (19.2%). You can maybe chalk it up as one more sign the team is on the verge of competing again. However, it’s only ranked 24th currently, having scored 41 goals, so on average just over one every two games.
However, if you take into consideration the league-leading 12 shorthanded goals the Canadiens have given up, their actual man advantage, well, isn’t one at all. For some context, the Philadelphia Flyers have the lowest success rate in the league at 13.0%. Taking their goal differentials on the power play into account, the Habs are only two better off at being bad… and the Habs were back at it against the Carolina Hurricanes on March 30.
In a relatively close game, in which the Canadiens were fairly impressive overall, their power-play inefficiency caught up with them again. Midway through the second, with Evgeny Kuznetsov off for delay of game, defenseman Mike Matheson bobbled the puck at the blue line. Hurricanes forward Teuvo Teravainen got it over to a breaking Jordan Staal who beat goalie Samuel Montembeault for the game-opening and eventually game-winning goal.
All alone, it’s not like that one goal was especially heartbreaking. The Canadiens are a non-playoff team. They were up against one of the best… a Presidents’ Trophy-contending team that had just clinched a berth their last game out, also shutting out the Detroit Red Wings (4-0 instead of 3-0 vs. the Habs). The fact the Habs had stuck in the game as long as they had was perhaps a testament to their recent strong play, having won a season-high three in a row heading into the contest.
Canadiens Struggling to Score on Power Play Too
However, you must take the Canadiens’ power play futility in this one game in the context of the bigger picture. Dating back to March 14, a span of eight games and 22 power-play opportunities, they’ve scored a single goal, when Nick Suzuki scored against the Flyers in a 4-1 win on March 28. So, by virtue of that having been their third win in a row and Suzuki having scored his career-high 30th, a mark no other Canadiens player has hit since Brendan Gallagher scored 33 in 2018-19, it’s easy to dismiss this as looking too closely at the trees in the forest. There are undeniable positive takeaways from this season.
Still, it’s not nitpicking when the power play has been a consistent problem going back to the misfit signing of Mike Hoffman back in 2021. You’d have to go back to 2017-18 for when it was last in the Top 15. However, coming off the previously mentioned 2021 Final appearance, then-general manager Marc Bergevin followed up one of his best offseasons, when he put that near-championship team together, with one of his worst… made worse yet by the departures of goalie Carey Price and Shea Weber, over which he admittedly had no control.
In retrospect though, Bergevin’s moves that 2021 offseason smelled of an inability on his part to acknowledge the Canadiens weren’t in a position to recontend (mixed with a note of desperation as a result). It was evident in how he overpaid for Christian Dvorak, right after losing Jesperi Kotkaniemi to an offer sheet and those same Hurricanes. And, while Hoffman had something in principle to offer the Habs as a power-play specialist, it never translated in practice and his three-year, $13.5 million deal became something of an albatross that current-GM Kent Hughes impressively traded away last summer.
Related: Canadiens Get Short-Term Upgrade on Kotkaniemi in Dvorak
Maybe Bergevin was overcompensating for the power play’s loss of Weber. And, in Bergevin’s defense, Hoffman did score 35 points on the man advantage with the Florida Panthers in 2018-19 (more than Weber, who only had a career-high 26 power-play points, ever did). However, Hoffman was never going to quarterback a power play on his own, as a complementary piece more than anything else. So, to a degree, the power play’s lack of success during his tenure was a personnel problem. It still is.
Patience a Virtue as Far as Habs Power Play Is Concerned
If you look at the unit’s current make-up, it’s not exactly faith-instilling past the first unit. If Tanner Pearson is getting an 11th-ranked 1:18 on the power play each game, it’s an issue, especially when Kirby Dach, Justin Barron and Sean Monahan players who have since gotten injured, demoted or traded, rank higher than him. So do Gallagher and Josh Anderson, whose respective offensive effectiveness has either dwindled in recent years or has been vastly overstated to begin with, especially as far as the power play is concerned.
Thankfully, Dach and Barron are poised to make more of an impact in the future… just hopefully more in favour of the Canadiens in Barron’s case (as opposed to the other team, looking at Matheson’s gaffe as an example of what I mean). With other offensive players in the pipeline like Joshua Roy up front and Lane Hutson on the blue line, there is realistic hope the Habs can turn it around eventually. So, it’s definitely more “wait and see” as opposed to sign someone new via free agency, because that’s how Hoffmans happen.
While it may be discouraging that this is one more example of preaching patience, that is par for the course for all intents and purposes. Fans should be and probably are for the most part okay with the fact that similar knee-jerk reactions to what characterized Bergevin’s eleventh hour aren’t exactly a part of Hughes’ modus operandi.
As a result of Hughes’ relatively fine work, there are undeniable signs things are sliding into place as we speak. It’s fair to assume the power play will also arrive once everything clicks more and more from a competitive standpoint. It’s just fair to call it what it is currently: not good, with some elements in place, but overall huge room for improvement, kind of like the Hurricanes loss in general. No one should be satisfied with the end result, just that said improvement is coming slowly but surely.