How the Canadiens’ first game without Kirby Dach opens possibilities for what’s to come

MONTREAL — Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis often says that he only addresses trends, not one-offs. A one-off will correct itself, a trend will not and requires intervention.

The Canadiens taking careless penalties is quite obviously a trend at this point. They lead the NHL with 24 minor penalties through three games and have been short-handed a league-leading 19 times as well after Tuesday night’s 5-2 loss to the Minnesota Wild. The Canadiens did not allow a single goal at five-on-five in the game and have only allowed two in their three games thus far.

But of the 24 minors the Canadiens have taken this season, half have come in the offensive zone, and another three came in the neutral zone.

“Offensive zone penalties are ones we can’t take,” Sean Monahan said. “I felt tonight it changes the momentum of the whole game. You’re in the box, there’s no flow to the game, guys are sitting on the bench, missing shifts. When you’re in the box that often, it’s really tough to win games.”

Let’s leave that at that for now. It’s a problem, the Canadiens will address it, St. Louis is not pleased with it, it will likely be corrected.

The more far-reaching information gathered in this game was how St. Louis and the Canadiens will react to the loss of Kirby Dach, whom the Canadiens confirmed after the game is done for the season with a torn ACL and MCL in his right knee that will require surgery once the swelling subsides.

On Tuesday morning, St. Louis didn’t want to reveal his forward lines for the game against the Wild. But I asked, generally, what goes into the decision between having a top-heavy lineup with all your talent loaded onto the top two lines and having a more balanced approach, something St. Louis had mentioned in training camp as something he would bounce back and forth on as the season went along depending on the Canadiens’ opponent and other factors.

The options he has at forward, he explained at the time, allowed him that luxury.

“Sometimes it’s home or away, how deep the other lineup is, the guys that are available to play. There’s a lot of things that come into play,” St. Louis said Tuesday morning. “Sometimes you would think of changing the lineup but it’s going so good, you don’t. You’ve got to feel it a little bit. So sometimes you start a game a certain way, doesn’t mean you’re going to finish like that. There’s a lot that goes into why we’re building our lineup a certain way.

“It’s not one reason. There’s multiple reasons.”

The reason I asked that question is the loss of Dach significantly changes the Canadiens’ ability to go top heavy. Perhaps Alex Newhook, who took over at centre on the second line for Dach on Tuesday, will prove to be as efficient a playdriver and playmaker as Dach, or will prove to a be a different kind of difference-maker. If that turns out to be the case, maybe St. Louis can have a realistic option between balance and top heavy at forward.

But until Newhook proves that to be the case — and it is possible he will — St. Louis is somewhat forced to go balanced up front. The Canadiens were already not exactly swimming in high-end talent at forward, but losing Dach makes that deficiency even more severe, and taking a balanced approach gives St. Louis the best chance to ice a winning lineup.

During training camp, while the Canadiens were in Mont-Tremblant, I asked St. Louis about the theory of strong-link and weak-link sports, in which strong-link sports are the ones where having the best player gives you the best chance of winning a game and weak-link sports are the ones where having your worst players outperform the other team’s worst players gives you the best chance of winning. Basketball would be an example of a strong-link sport, and soccer an example of a weak-link sport.

St. Louis had never heard of the theory, but once he looked into it, he determined that hockey was closer to being a weak-link sport than a strong-link sport, that depth was more vital to victory in hockey than star power.

That’s debatable, of course, because almost every year the team that raises the Stanley Cup is driven by star players. But when you don’t have those star players, you can be forced into a weak-link approach.

Dach is not a star player, not yet at least, but his absence somewhat forces the Canadiens into a weak-link approach. Which is what made the line combinations Tuesday somewhat revealing.

Rafaël Harvey-Pinard let the cat out of the bag after practice Monday that he would be moving to the top line with Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield against the Wild, which made it natural to assume Josh Anderson would move to left wing with Newhook and Juraj Slafkovský. But that’s not what happened. Anderson moved to the third line with Brendan Gallagher and Monahan, while Tanner Pearson moved up from the third line to complete Newhook and Slafkovský.

It provided the Canadiens with more balance, a similar threat level for their second and third lines, giving them a better chance of having the third line win its matchup. It was doubling down on depth.

When asked if that was the case after the game, St. Louis was just as elusive as he was in the morning.

“I think tonight it would be the opponent, but I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it. We don’t play until Saturday, so we have time to come up for air and try to find the right solution, whatever that is.”

Sounds promising.

St. Louis may not want to commit to it right now, but it would be a smart move for him to stick with this strategy, no matter the opponent. The Canadiens want to take a competitive step this season, and while it would be easy to see Dach’s injury as an opportunity to secure another high draft pick, it is actually an opportunity to experiment with ways to maximize the talent they have on hand.

Newhook and Harvey-Pinard were the main beneficiaries Tuesday, but St. Louis could double down even harder on the weak-link theory. Adding Anderson to the third line is one thing, but moving Gallagher to the fourth line could be another way to accomplish that, especially since Jesse Ylönen is showing real signs that he deserves a bigger role than he has right now. And the Canadiens have options to further strengthen the fourth line by calling Joel Armia back up from Laval or Lias Andersson instead of using Michael Pezzetta with Jake Evans.

“I think we’ve got good depth,” Suzuki said. “Obviously when you lose Dacher that’s a big piece, but I thought Newy had a good game in the middle, he knows how to play there, so it’s kind of a good fit for him to move into the middle. But our five-on-five is good, it’s when we shoot ourselves in the foot that we get in trouble.”

The Canadiens can take advantage of a bad situation with Dach out. They can bank on their depth to try to win a different way. Teams will now be able to focus all their defensive attention on Suzuki and Caufield on the top line unless they give them a reason not to.

St. Louis noted that Christian Dvorak will be back in a couple of weeks, and that will give him even more options to use Monahan higher in the lineup and perhaps give opponents something else to think about when concocting their matchups.

“I think that will help us even more to have some options to fill out our lines and come up with something that can disrupt our opponents so they can’t just focus on Nick,” he said.

It is unfortunate that Emil Heineman is also injured right now, because this would be an ideal situation to call him up and become part of that depth-reliant mix. But eventually, he could be an option, as could Joshua Roy if he proves he’s ready for NHL action.

It would be easy for the Canadiens to look at the Dach injury as a continuation of the bad injury luck they have had for the last two years — not to mention the upper-body injury that knocked Kaiden Guhle out of the game Tuesday — but if they were to use it as a test kitchen for how this Canadiens team could win down the road in a loaded Atlantic Division, that would be one of the benefits they could draw from a bad situation.

The Canadiens’ future strength will clearly be on defence, with the potential of having a mobile and dynamic group on the blue line within the next two years. Maybe being forced into a weak-link strategy at forward right now is not such a bad thing, because that could be how this team ultimately wins when that group on defence is ready to make an impact.

That would truly be looking at long-term trends as opposed to the one-off of this season.

(Photo of Alex Newhook: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)