CANADIENS
Montreal

KINGS
Los Angeles

Lineup

Forward lines and defense pairings 

[one_half]Pacioretty – Drouin – Galchenyuk
Lehkonen – Plekanec – Hemsky
Byron – Danault – Shaw
Hudon – De La Rose – Gallagher
[/one_half]

[one_half_last]Mete – Weber
Alzner – Petry
Morrow – Benn
[/one_half_last]

Goaltenders

Montoya
Price

Scratches

Brandon Davidson, Torrey Mitchell

Injuries

David Schlemko – hand (mid-November)

Game Report

Like you, many Habs fans sit munching their free fries on Thursday wondering what has happened to their beloved team in the matter of a few months. McDonald’s first goal promotion has been one of the few bright spots this season.

With the off-season addition of a budding, hometown superstar, many were predicting that the Canadiens to cruise to the post-season and go deep into the playoffs. Yet, after seven games, the Habs find themselves at the bottom of the Atlantic Division well back of their historic rival, the Toronto Maple Leafs.

In fact, the Canadiens find themselves in the bottom three of the entire league, just above the winless Arizona Coyotes. Montreal has scored 11 goals in seven games — the Maple Leafs have 34. And at minus-16, the Habs own the league’s worst goal differential.

Clearly, the 2017-18 edition of the Canadiens are not a good team and their newly-acquired local hero has not lived up to expectations. Still, the excuses persist: it’s early, bad chemistry, biased officiating, new system, etc. A new one (perhaps the most lame of them all) emerged in the last 24 hours: a really hard schedule.

The silver-lining of the Los Angeles game is that one of the false narratives that was being peddled — Carey Price was solely responsible — has been harpooned. Al Montoya is now the owner of a 4.22 goals against average and a .863 save percentage. Like Price, his numbers are not at all indicative of his performance this season.

Defensively, the Canadiens did a much better job supporting their goaltender in L.A., limiting high-danger scoring chances for the first two periods. But all of that collapsing in front left the Kings to dominate the boards. Montreal struggled with clearing the puck out of their zone all night.

Alex Galchenyuk joined the top line for the first time this season, and was perhaps the lone bright spot of the trio. Of the Canadiens 72 shots attempts, Jonathan Drouin anemically managed just one, finishing with a 24.00 Corsi for percentage. In addition, Drouin continued to struggle at centre winning just 33 per cent of his draws.

The Canadiens number one line was effectively shutdown by Anze Kopitar and co. On the Kings second line, Jeff Carter exited in the first period after being cut by Jeff Petry’s skate. So it was LA’s third line that dominated led by a combined eight point game from Adrian Kempe and Mike Cammalleri.

With the Canadiens defence in disarray, they could not stop the supporting cast of the Kings. Joe Morrow, Jordie Benn and Jeff Petry each had more than their share of gaffes during the game. While fans understandably point to the lack of goal scoring, it is the defence that continues to be the Habs greatest weakness.

~~~

▲     Paul Byron, Jacob De La Rose, Shea Weber

▼      Jonathan Drouin, Max Pacioretty, Joe Morrow, Jordie Benn, Jeff Petry

1. Adrian Kempe  LAK
2. Michael Cammalleri  LAK
3. Jonathan Quick  LAK

• On third period breakdowns: “Unnecessary risks. Simple as that.”
• “I don’t accept that. When you’re in a hockey game like you are after two periods, you got to be smart. You got to make the right decisions and we didn’t do that. There’s accountability that comes with that and we need to be a lot better and a lot smarter in those situations if we’re going to turn this around and win some hockey games. The risks that we took were unacceptable.”
• “I can tell you I was pleased with (Jacob) De La Rose’s line and (Phillip) Danault’s line that gave us a lot more tonight. We needed, I thought, four lines in order to survive this game: a big team and us playing last night. So we tried to balance things out a little bit and make sure that every line brought something and for two periods they did. But, so, obviously, the end kind of tarnished that.”

Paul Byron

• “We’re trying to create offense, we’re generating chances, we’re generating shots. A lot of the chances are just one and done, not enough second and third chance rebounds.”
• “I think too much focus right now is trying to create offense. I think, maybe, that we’re cheating in areas a little bit and we’re getting caught by that and giving up a lot of odd man rushes and leaving our goalies out to dry.”

Quotes courtesy of NHL.com