In the Habs Room: Canadiens in bad need of some ‘Gally spice’
Ducharme #Ducharme
“We need all the guys to put a little Gally spice into their game,” Canadiens head coach Dominique Ducharme said after Saturday’s 4-0 loss to the Ottawa Senators at the Bell Centre.
No kidding.
It becomes more obvious every game the Canadiens simply aren’t the same team without their true leader, Brendan Gallagher, in the lineup.
Gallagher missed his seventh straight game since suffering a fractured thumb during a 3-2 OT win over the Edmonton Oilers on April 5. In those seven games, the Canadiens have a 2-5-0 record and have scored only 11 goals while getting shut out twice.
The Canadiens got some good news before Saturday’s game when Ducharme said Gallagher wouldn’t need surgery on his right thumb. Earlier in the week, GM Marc Bergevin said he didn’t expect the right-winger back before the end of the regular season.
Pass the Gally spice, please.
Lots of it.
“I said it the other day, you don’t really replace a guy like Gally,” the Canadiens’ Paul Byron said. “What he means to our team, his timely goals, leadership, his energy. But it’s on everybody to just kind of find an extra gear in our game and try and replace it as a team. I know it’s not an easy thing to do, but we’ve got a lot of good players here — good enough players that we can go in game-in, game-out, and still find a way to get more offence than we’ve been getting lately.
“I think winning our battles, retrieving pucks, forechecking, and things that used to be our forté of our team we’ve kind of slipped away from that a little bit. I think once we find that, find our groove again, really attack the other teams, put pressure on them, kind of hound them instead of being hounded, it’s going to change things for us. We’re going to spend more time in their zone and it’s going to lead to more scoring chances. Not getting boxed out, trying to get rebound goals and going to get those second, third chances. That’s big.”
That’s what Gallagher does. Not enough other players on the Canadiens are willing to do that and it’s really starting to show.
The Canadiens are getting almost no offence from the centre position. Nick Suzuki has one goal in the last 11 games. Phillip Danault has one goal in the last nine games. Jesperi Kotkaniemi has no goals in the last 10 games. Eric Staal, after scoring an OT winner in his first game with the Canadiens, has no goals in the last seven games.
Jonathan Drouin — tied with Josh Anderson as the highest-paid forward on the team with a salary-cap hit of US$5.5 million — has no goals in the last 24 games and only two on the season.
Newcomers Tyler Toffoli (21) and Anderson (15), along with Gallagher (14), have accounted for 50 of the Canadiens’ 125 goals this season, which works out to 40 per cent. No other forward on the team has more than 10 goals.
“It’s on each individual,” defenceman Ben Chiarot said about the lack of offence without Gallagher. “We have lots of guys up front and on the back end who can create offence. I think, first of all, going to that area. It’s not an easy area to get to. There’s usually some punishment doled out when you want to stand in front of the net or in the slot. I think being willing to go there and then having guys willing to hang on to that puck for an extra second and find a guy and put it to the middle. We got to get better at that. That’s something that’s going to be important for us to generate more offence because right now we’re just not getting enough.”
When asked if he was suggesting some players aren’t willing to pay the price, Chiarot said: “No, I don’t mean that. We got lots of guys willing to pay the price. But it’s one thing to do it off-and-on, it’s another thing to go there night-after-night and be willing to battle in there. So I think that the consistency of doing it is something that we could get better at.”
Where’s that Gally spice?
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