The Canadiens must re-evaluate their goals after another embarrassing defeat

MONTREAL – Montreal Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis was asked before Thursday night’s game against the Pittsburgh Penguins if he breaks the season down into segments, bite-sized chunks that are easier to digest. He said he did it.

It’s important, he said, to set smaller goals over the course of a season, and without revealing how he divided the schedule, it wouldn’t be hard to see the game against the Penguins as the end of one of them. It was the Canadiens’ fifth straight home game, their longest homestand of the season, and they had a chance to finish it with four wins.

Despite a sloppy game, the Canadiens still had the chance after 40 minutes. Luckily, the Penguins played just as sloppily.

It seemed to be a battle between two teams that wanted to give up the game, with dueling turnovers, odd rushes and missed defensive calls. In the end, the Canadiens simply wanted to give up more than the Penguins.

Losing six goals in the third period of a 3-2 hockey game is considered a regulation loss, just like a 3-2 Canadiens loss. But it doesn’t feel the same because when you add humiliation into the mix it seems different. It’s harder to justify, it forces self-reflection.

“We are in the game, just unacceptable,” Kaiden Guhle said after the 9-2 carnage. “It’s kind of hard to say exactly. After the 5-2 goal, that seemed to be it, and that is unacceptable for everyone, including me. It’s embarrassing. People come to see us and watch us play and compete. They’re spending their money, it’s unacceptable.”

Tristan Jarry, who stopped 21 of 23 shots, made a save from Josh Anderson. (David Kirouac/Imagn Images)

St. Louis has said repeatedly that this Canadiens season is about development, yes, but also about learning how to win.

However, the reality after 29 games is that this Canadiens season is increasingly about repeats of games like that, losses that are unacceptable, losses that must be learned from, losses that cannot be learned from because they always happen again.

It started in the fourth game of the season against the same Penguins and in the same building, when a 3-2 Canadiens lead turned into a 6-3 loss late in the second period. Eight days later there was a 7-2 loss to the New York Rangers, again on home ice, only the game was already 4-0 before it was twelve minutes old. A week later there was another 8-2 home defeat against the Seattle Kraken. The next game was Washington’s infamous 6-3 loss to the Capitals, in which St. Louis insisted the Canadiens surrender in the third period of a 3-3 tie. A 6-2 home loss to Vegas, a 6-3 loss in Boston and now this.

If the larger goal is to learn how to win, then it is indeed necessary to create smaller goals. Because the defining characteristic of this Canadiens season right now isn’t that they’re learning how to win. It’s because these “unacceptable” losses occur again and again to such a degree that when you segment the season, periods of progress are interrupted by repeated episodes of unprofessional behavior.

“Pucks end up in the net, things happen, but our play can’t let up that much,” Brendan Gallagher said. “We say we have to learn from this, and we do, but ultimately you can only say it for so long. You have to go out there and act as a group.”

Almost 25 percent of the games the Canadiens have played this season have been so-called unacceptable losses. And five of those seven losses came at home, where, as Guhle mentioned, their fans paid exorbitant ticket prices to watch them compete.

“It’s embarrassing for us as players,” said captain Nick Suzuki. “I hate it when that happens. We definitely deserved the booing tonight. We love playing at home and we have to be much better in the third game.”

And of those seven unacceptable losses, this one may have been the worst because Guhle and Jake Evans insinuated that their team gave up in the third period.

In fact, Evans said so openly.

“Maybe it’s the fourth goal they get and we just give up or something,” Evans said. “I don’t know. But we have to fix this.”

This is a bad look for a young team trying to establish a culture and identity.

“Every move counts in this league. There is not a single action on the ice that cannot influence the outcome of the game. These actions escaped us in the third period,” said St. Louis. “I think we’ve come a long way, but every now and then we have these moments. Unfortunately, sometimes I feel like it’s part of our growth and we hope that these moments happen less often, and when they do happen, they can’t happen multiple times in a row.”

The Canadiens play the Jets on Saturday in Winnipeg. It’s the start of a new segment after another embarrassing defeat, and it’s a difficult task.

But an embarrassing loss is still a loss. And the Canadiens are still 7-6-1 in their last 14 games. Their goal difference in these seven unacceptable defeats is minus-31. In the other 22 games it is plus-2. While the unacceptable losses are a chronic, defining feature of their season, there is an opportunity for the Canadiens to build on the good ones while trying to eradicate this poison that afflicts them every four games or so.

They still have 53 games left, and when St. Louis was asked about segmenting the season, he mentioned that while smaller goals can be looked at between games, on game day this game is the only priority.

May we suggest at this point that these smaller goals should simply disappear? That the only segment the Canadiens have to pay attention to is the following game?

Because so far this group has missed the importance of every game and every moment far too often. That’s the level of an NHL player, an NHL team.

The Canadiens clearly need to reach that bottom before they can worry about anything bigger.

(Top photo of Rickard Rakell scoring against Sam Montembeault of the Canadiens: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)