It was three straight days of noise after a bad loss to the New York Rangers earlier in the week.
The noise about how the Canadiens were the leakiest team in the NHL, with four straight losses, increased the volume about how they couldn't apply the hybrid system that coach Martin St. Louis wanted them to play.
It reached a deafening level when Friday arrived, with St. Louis under fire from all directions.
He and the Canadiens closed it out this weekend, reeling off back-to-back wins against the St. Louis Blues and Philadelphia Flyers to climb back into the mix of the Atlantic Division — a mixed bag of sorts, with five of eight teams (including the Canadiens ). ) currently has a 4-4-1 record.
Results matter, without a doubt.
How they were achieved matters more.
We're talking about a team that allowed at least 17 high-danger attempts per game in three of its first six games before allowing just 19 overall over the weekend.
And that number was inflated primarily due to scoring effects, with the Canadiens holding two- and three-goal leads in the third period over the Blues and Flyers, respectively.
They suffocated both teams in all three zones for most of these 120 minutes. They handled the puck well and released it in the right areas to establish highly effective forehandling. They stepped back hard up the middle to allow their defenders to kill off most of the attacks on their defensive blue line. And when the puck ended up in their zone, the Canadiens resolved coverage quickly and took advantage of opportunities to break cycles and get back on offense.
It was everything they couldn't do against the Rangers and everything St. Louis ordered them to correct as the noise around them grew and grew and inevitably reached their ears.
“I'll tell you why I'm not listening,” St. Louis said when we asked him about it Friday. “Why would I listen to criticism from someone I would never ask for advice?”
Still, he acknowledged that he heard the noise.
“It's funny because I was walking to the Bell Center yesterday, going to work,” St. Louis explained. “There were a couple of followers who stopped me and said, 'Don't listen to them, keep working,' so I realized this was happening.
“It's part of the market, but it's not going to change what I do and it's not going to make me angry.
“But if it does something… it gives me energy.”
He pointed out that it always has been.
St. Louis made his way into the Hockey Recibidor of Fame as an undersized, undrafted player who ritually silenced his critics and skeptics. So this week he was back in the club again, although actually for the first time as a coach.
Had the weekend gone differently, it could have marked the official end of the honeymoon phase St. Louis has enjoyed since taking over the rebuilding Canadiens in February 2022.
Instead, we saw developments, which could provoke some mea culpas towards him throughout Montreal.
It's not that Canadians were perfect.
But even if the game against the Flyers ended 4-3, St. Louis rightly pointed out to reporters at the Wells Fargo Heart afterward that, “If you didn't watch the game and just looked at the scoresheet, you'd think it was a close game.”
It wasn't, until the Canadiens made a mistake that ended in the back of their net with 2:12 left in the third period.
Travis Sanheim's score cut Philadelphia's deficit to two goals.
Before scoring it, head coach John Tortorella seemed to have no intention of pulling Aleksei Kolosov (who was appearing in his first NHL game) and putting in an extra attacker because the game looked like a lost cause.
The Canadiens had given up almost nothing up to that point, and then allowed another goal after Sanheim's just 29 seconds later and were forced to turn the screw again to close this one out.
In a sense, it was good that that happened. It served as a reminder of the aggressive defensive play that gave them these two wins and how tenuous a good feeling can be when you don't know the game plan.
Not unlike the loss to the Rangers, which was the ugliest of the four consecutive losses they suffered.
While many ranted and raved about it, St. Louis saw it as an opportunity to get the Canadiens back on track.
He was sure that the work he undertook this week would pay off, and he was right.
“I think we are much closer to the version we want to be, and sometimes that version comes with some failure along the way that pushes you to a better version of yourself,” he said after the victory in Philadelphia. “I think it gets us to a better version faster when there are some glitches at the beginning.”
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Quick hits:
• Cole Caufield took his share of the NHL lead in goals by scoring his eighth in his ninth game of the season.
He scored his eighth goal in his 30thgame last season.
While struggling to get there a year ago before finishing reasonably strong with 20 goals in his final 52 games, St. Louis said all along that it wasn't worried about Caufield's scoring returning to the level we've become accustomed to and praised repeatedly. him for undergoing the process of completing his game.
Caufield's all-around game is now getting back to what it was last season after a lukewarm start with his linemates earlier this month. And even if his shooting percentage drops from 30.8 (and it surely will) don't expect him to drop to the level he was at last season.
Before Caufield shot just 8.9 percent, he scored on 14 percent of his shots during his first three seasons in the league. If he continues to shoot as frequently as he has and scores on 14 percent of his shots in the remaining games of the season, he will score over 40 goals for the first time in his career.
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• Big weekend for Kirby Dach, who scored his first goal and added an assist on Saturday to double his total points in the first seven games before recording an assist on Nick Suzuki's goal against the Flyers.
You saw how confidence increased for him in Philadelphia, which is good news for Dach and certainly for the Canadiens.
They have him filling in for the injured Juraj Slafkovsky, who missed all of this week with an upper-body injury. The purpose was to boost Dach's confidence and keep the top line moving, another strong move by St. Louis that paid dividends.
The coach will eventually return Dach to center, but could keep Dach on the wing for now even if Slafkovsky returns Tuesday, when the Canadiens host the Seattle Kraken at Bell Heart for a game.
If he does, he could still get a secondary offensive kick trying with Slafkovsky on the second line as the Suzuki line continues to roll.
• Suzuki's goal against the Flyers extended his point streak to seven games.
• It's early, but the Canadiens' special teams have been excellent through the first nine games of the season. They have the eighth-best power play (25.8 percent) and the third-best penalty kill (90.3 percent).
Maybe they will go down slightly in both categories.
But as long as Canadians don't fall dramatically into one or both, their chances of staying “in the mix” increase significantly. Especially if they take advantage of the improvements they made at five-on-five over the weekend.
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