St. Louis made playoff-bound Canadiens believers against all odds
It’s a coach’s job to sell, and Martin St. Louis did that job as well as any coach this season.
MONTREAL — It’s a coach’s job to sell, and Martin St. Louis did that job as well as any of his 15 colleagues who led their teams to the Stanley Cup Playoffs this season.
He has been selling since the beginning of training camp in September. And he was selling after a 5-10-2 start to the season pushed the Canadiens into last place in the NHL, as far as they could possibly be from where they landed following their last game on Wednesday.
A 4-2 win over the Carolina Hurricanes punched the Canadiens’ first ticket to the playoffs since 2021, but St. Louis put that ticket in their hands. He sold them on defending the way teams who make the playoffs have always defended. He sold them on calculating the risk-reward ratio in every scenario. As St. Louis says, he urged them to “do the things that aren’t as fun and do them like you love them.”
It’s a message he kept selling through 82 games.
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But St. Louis’ greatest success was selling hope to the Canadiens. Especially at times when hope was beyond fleeting.
“We talked about it just after the game,” said Mike Matheson. “(Canadiens assistant coach Trevor Letowski) got up and reiterated that at the 4 Nations break there was a two per-cent chance that we were going to make the playoffs, and I don’t even know what the percentage was going into the season, but at no point did Marty ever stop believing. And I think during those times when it was maybe a little bit harder to believe, he picked us back up and kept that belief and drive and focus. So the word that comes to mind is ‘instrumental.’
“What Marty did was instrumental and, without it, I don’t know where we’d be at.”
We know it wouldn’t be anywhere near the playoffs in Year 3 of a rebuild.
St. Louis took over as coach of the Canadiens in February of 2022 and has been pouring the foundation for what they’ve become ever since.
He gave young players the licence to make mistakes, addressing the trends in their play rather than harping on one-off sequences. On the collective front, he taught the Canadiens the concepts they’d need to adhere to keep pushing them forward.
St. Louis felt they were ready to go from learning how to play to learning how to win this season, and he absorbed the hard lessons all through that process.
None of them were more challenging than the ones faced over the final six days of the regular season, as opportunities to clinch a playoff spot kept slipping through the Canadiens’ fingers and the Columbus Blue Jackets kept narrowing the gap.
“I feel I experienced the same as the players,” said St. Louis. “I was stressed as well. And you almost have to normalize that. We had a great conversation yesterday with the group, and I made them understand that, yes, I was stressed, too, but you’ve got to let those feelings go when the games start and you’ve just got to go out and play the game. But everything in between the games, it’s normal you feel the way you do — especially with the way the schedule lined up.”
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The pressure kept mounting, with the Blue Jackets winning and the Canadiens losing.
But the players took St. Louis’ message to heart and found a way to calm themselves enough to finally deliver Wednesday.
Kaiden Guhle, who scored two goals, threw seven hits, and logged nearly 24 minutes, said he spent the day telling himself, “Just go play hockey, do what you’ve been doing your entire life.” He was repeating the message the coach delivered.
Lane Hutson did it alongside Guhle, helping set one of his goals to earn his 60th assist of the season, which tied him with Larry Murphy for the most a rookie defenceman has ever produced in the NHL.
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Captain Nick Suzuki led the charge up front, assisting on Guhle’s first goal and scoring his 30th of the season to give him 89 points, while linemates Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky also each hit plateaus in their young careers.
When you think about all the players St. Louis coached up, those last two have arguably made the greatest strides under his guidance.
So it was fitting that, on Wednesday, Caufield had his 33rd assist to finish with a career-high 70 points, and Slafkovsky played one of his best games of the season while reaching a career-high 51 points.
Never mind that those milestones were hit in a game that was won against a Hurricanes team resting top guns Sebastian Aho, Seth Jarvis and Jaccob Slavin, plus Jordan Martinook, Jackson Blake, Jalen Chatfield, Jordan Staal and Frederik Andersen. The Canadiens were playing against a team that refused to back down — and against themselves — and they did what they had to do, like they had in 51 other games in which they collected points.
Since the end of the 4 Nations tournament, only four teams in the NHL have collected a higher percentage of points available to them in the standings.
“I’m so proud of the group in coming off the break,” said St. Louis. “I think we had a two per cent chance of making the playoffs and then we go 15-5-6 and we finish the year on a 7-1-2 run trying to stay ahead of Columbus, who was really hot down the stretch. For me, a two per cent chance, you still have a chance.”
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He believed.
And when it came down to crunch time, St. Louis learned.
“I learned a lot this year at different times for different reasons,” St. Louis said. “I learned a lot the last four games, and I think it’s something I needed to go through as a coach as well.”
His decisions faced a higher level of scrutiny than they had at any other point over his coaching tenure. They were picked apart by everyone in the market, but he made them with conviction and experienced something that will serve him well moving forward.
It’s experience that will help St. Louis navigate a playoff series against the East-leading Washington Capitals, and experience that will undoubtedly prepare him to venture into a new era as Canadiens coach with the team expected to compete (and eventually contend) year over year moving forward.
And St. Louis will continue to sell. He will sell his vision, and he will sell his belief, just like he did all season.
“He was never in rebuild mode and always in winning mode and always wanted to win for us and always believed in us,” said Guhle. “It’s what you need in your head coach. He can’t have any doubt. If he had any doubt, it would creep into the room, and he didn’t have any. So I think that’s the biggest thing. He’s our No. 1 fan, our No. 1 believer, and without him we wouldn’t be here. He’s for sure a huge piece of our success.”
