1 week Ago By Brian Wilde
Third game of the season for the Pittsburgh Penguins and Montreal Canadiens. Montreal was dominated again. Add a 9-2 loss to the previous losses of 6-3 and 3-1.
Only one piece of good news: they don’t play the Penguins again this season. Wilde Horses Lane Hutson had the longest rookie points streak for a defenceman in Canadiens history snapped at seven games. Still, Hutson was the best player by a large margin.
There was a shift in the first period Hutson set up two forwards with breathtaking passes. He won puck battles. He dangled.
He was unstoppable. The only issue was no one could convert any of his greatness. Hutson just might be the best player on the Canadiens this season.
He’s in a competition with only Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield. No one else even comes close. Barring an injury to the Flyers Matvei Michkov, Hutson won’t win the rookie of the year award, but in many seasons what he is doing would be enough.
Hutson plays 25 minutes a night in his first season. Remarkable. It appears it is another season without the playoffs, but in a rebuild, the goal is to add to the talent on the top-four on defence and top-six on offence.
Montreal has definitely added a top-four defender. In fact, they’ve added their best defender. Wilde Goats This one was lost on the 2-1 goal midway through the second period.
Usually, there are two or three goats on a goal, but this one was essentially all on Mike Matheson. The Canadiens had control in the offensive zone, but Matheson lost the puck at the blue line. In the defensive zone, the nightmare shift ended with Bryan Rust walking around Matheson straight to the goal before beating Samuel Montembeault.
Three minutes later, Matheson completed the forgettable period with another blind giveaway in his own zone. One pass later, it was Rust with another marker. 3-1 for the Penguins.
It can go wrong so fast in the NHL. A tight game turns into a lost game. In Matheson’s defence, not all defenders can play equally well on their off-side.
Kaiden Guhle has been asked to do it for almost his entire professional career, and his level is almost the same on both sides. However, Matheson struggles mightily on the wrong side. Matheson and Hutson aren’t a logical pairing either.
They are both offence first. Head coach Martin St. Louis did the best he could with his pairings when David Savard was a late scratch just before the contest.
Any season that the top prospects on the right side Logan Mailloux and David Reinbacher want to be ready for the NHL is a good season. Wilde Cards It is remarkable how many highs and lows there are in the prospect process. One week a player is on a high and looks like a sure-fire NHL player, and the next week, they can fall down the depth chart.
It shows that the biggest fight that a prospect has is consistency. This is why it is necessary to wait a time before evaluating a prospect’s season. In ranking the best and worst of this year, so far, there are some big surprises.
Of the three grades of ‘A’ on the report cards, two are expected and one is a bit of a surprise. Ivan Demidov is ESPN’s best prospect not playing in the NHL today. Demidov was off to the greatest ‘draft plus one’ season in the history of the KHL in the first 20 games with 18 points.
It was a better start than Alexander Ovechkin, Matvei Michkov, or Evgeni Malkin in the season after the draft. After that, his head coach stepped in to ruin his season. Demidov gets fewer than five minutes of ice most games, and sometimes he sits on the players’ bench the entire contest.
None of this changes the fact Demidov is going to be a star. He may be the first 100-point Canadiens player since Mats Naslund in the 1986. The next ‘A’ on the report card is for Jacob Fowler.
Fowler has a save percentage of .933. More than that, the kid has an attitude.
Goalies need attitude. It’s not good if a bad goal gets in the head of a goalie. There will be bad goals.
They can’t make for insecurity. The final ‘A’ belongs to Owen Beck. The leader in scoring in Laval is a rookie who has barely started his pro career.
This is rare. More common is that scorers in the OHL juniors find scoring in the AHL very hard. Again, more than the totals, though, is the intangibles.
Beck is more known as a 200-foot centre who is greatly aware of the responsibilities on the defensive side of the puck. That he is adding scoring is a massive bonus. There was a reason that Beck won the MVP at the Memorial Cup for Saginaw.
He has the ability to win the middle of the ice. He’s been a special player to start his career. He is showing that he could be a second line centre in the NHL.
Very few saw that coming. Just under a grade of ‘A’ is Michael Hage. The Canadiens fought hard to get to 21st overall because they felt they could get Hage there, and they were right.
Hage has been outstanding at Michigan. He is at a point-per-game pace. Historically, a collegian at that pace is an NHL player almost 100 per cent of the time.
Hage would earn the same grade as the other three, except for one minor issue that he needs to clean up. Hage is not good on the defensive side of the puck while earning these point totals. He neglects his duties at times, and doesn’t work hard enough at keeping it out of the net as much as he does getting it in the net.
Four additional prospects are in the same category of surprising to the upside and showing that they have NHL careers in front of them. Oliver Kapanen is back at Timra scoring at a point-per-game. The Canadiens love that he is another player who has a 200-foot game.
Jared Davidson is the leading goal scorer on the Laval Rocket. Davidson is not a great skater, so he gets underestimated in every league he tries, but every league he tries, he excels. Davidson still has a road in front of him, but he competes, he scores, he may be a player just yet.
Another with a professional comportment is Luke Tuch. He won’t ever be a big scorer at any level, but he delivers big hits, he is smart without the puck, and it is easy to see him in the NHL on the fourth line taking care of the business at the pro level. Adam Engstrom also came to camp in September largely unknown by the coaching staff who immediately liked what they saw.
Engstrom has to clean up his defence a little still, but the offence is there, and the ceiling could be high. He wasn’t thought of as an NHLer four months ago, but the Canadiens are thinking again now. Two players have taken a bit of a step back who seemed a lock.
Joshua Roy and Logan Mailloux have figured it out at the AHL level, but at the NHL level it remains out of their grasp. Roy did little in his brief look recently, and Mailloux goes from dominant to worrisome when he goes up a tier. They’re young.
They still get high grades. The low grades are few. Certainly, a player can’t be punished for being seriously injured, so we have very little idea what David Reinbacher can be, but the management team is very high on him.
To them, Reinbacher has done nothing wrong on the ice. They’re right. Evaluation can’t go down on a player who isn’t playing.
Same for Filip Mesar who was off to a flying start in Laval, but then got injured. Mesar just returned to on-ice with the Rocket in a non-contact jersey. Mesar’s start was encouraging.
The only player who has been a clear disappointment is Sean Farrell. One of the most dominating players in USHL history with the Chicago Steel, then also superb at Harvard, Farrell is finding it very rough going at the AHL level. For the first time in his career, the lack of size has become an issue.
He has less time and space to weave his creative magic, and that’s been the difference. Instead, he’s now in puck battles more than open space, and he can’t win those. All in all, it’s been a tremendous season for the prospects.
VP Jeff Gorton said on Monday night that he believes a lot of impactful players are still coming. The performances back up that optimism..
