As Canadiens push for playoffs, development of young stars remains guiding light
Montreal beat Buffalo for its fourth straight win on Saturday to climb within three points of the playoffs. But what matters even more may be the solid play of the team’s youngest players.
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It’s a four-game winning streak that guarantees nothing for the Montreal Canadiens, but is far from meaningless.
It mattered that the Canadiens beat the Buffalo Sabres 4-2 on Saturday to keep positive momentum and pull within three points of a wild-card position in the Eastern Conference with the trade deadline looming in less than a week. Not because it guaranteed general manager Kent Hughes will keep the band together between now and next Friday, but because it helped keep the Canadiens’ youngest players in position to continue developing in meaningful games.
Watching their three youngest ones on the blue line play such a huge hand in delivering a win in the most important game of the season Saturday was watching them continue to take a vital step in their development, and the Canadiens had to be as happy about that as the two points.
With 11 minutes left in the third period at KeyBank Center, Jayden Struble made two pivotal plays to help secure the one-goal lead to which the Canadiens were clinging.
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He first stepped up and blocked Owen Power’s shot from 15 feet out, and then he swept Power’s stick out of position to eliminate any chance of the puck getting closer to Canadiens goaltender Jakub Dobes on the rebound.
The 23-year-old Struble had already watched 21-year-old partner Lane Hutson make the biggest offensive contributions in the win. He had a front-row seat from the bench as Hutson eliminated a shorthanded rush from the Sabres before sending a stretch pass up to start the sequence that led to Montreal’s first goal of the game 1:13 in the second, and he was parked there again when Hutson helped set up two more goals.
But with the lead on the line, Struble had a chance to shine, stepped into the spotlight and owned it with those plays on Power.
Arber Xhekaj, 24, was trying to avoid that spotlight, and he succeeded. He was under it for the wrong reasons in Montreal on Thursday, stapled to the bench by Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis after a costly play late in the second period led to a San Jose Sharks goal and stamped a poor performance on his part, and he refused to get burned again in Buffalo.
Xhekaj stood his ground, he closed his gaps, he threw big hits on the Sabres’ biggest players — six-foot-six behemoths Tage Thompson and Jordan Greenway — and he finished the game having played 20 nearly flawless shifts.
He wasn’t perfect.
Neither were Struble and Hutson, who were caught on the ice for Buffalo’s second goal of the game.
But they bounced back hard, and so did Xhekaj.
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Owen Beck, 21, continued to bounce forward. He played another strong game between Alex Newhook (who scored the winning goal) and Patrik Laine, and he’ll have the chance to play many more from that spot with Kirby Dach out the rest of the season following right-knee surgery on Friday.
And even if 20-year-old Juraj Slafkovsky’s four-game point streak came to an end, his mean streak of laying the body continued with a team-high five hits.
This was Dobes’ 10th appearance in the NHL but his first under this much pressure — coming off three consecutive losses and being trusted to keep the Canadiens breathing in the suffocating playoff race — and the 23-year-old stood up to it by stopping 23 of 25 Sabres shots.
There’s a possibility none of Dobes, Slafkovsky, Beck, Xhekaj, Struble, Hutson or fellow rookie Emil Heineman will get into a Stanley Cup Playoff game this season. The odds are heavily against the Canadiens making it, and they might worsen significantly after 3 p.m. ET on Friday.
They will get bleaker if Jake Evans, who scored the insurance marker in Saturday’s game, is traded instead of signed. And they’re certainly not going to get better if any combination of Joel Armia, Christian Dvorak and David Savard move.
But as Cole Caufield said after scoring the overtime winner against the San Jose Sharks Thursday, “it’s do or die now,” and these kids are helping the Canadiens stay alive and gaining such valuable experience in the process.
Whether Evans, Armia, Dvorak and Savard stay or go, more young players currently helping the Laval Rocket chase top spot in the American Hockey League will also get some opportunities to do that in the NHL over some of the remaining games of the season.
That’ll be a win for the organization, too — on top of the ones they got on Saturday, with the young defencemen taking a step by helping the Canadiens guarantee more meaningful games lie ahead.
