Canadiens finally rewarded in bizarre win over Kraken

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It was only the Montreal Canadiens’ third win in 10 games of March, and it ended up being a soul-soothing, nerve-calming, goal-filled affair.

In all those ways, and several more, it was an outlier for this team.  

The Canadiens scored on four of their first six shots in Seattle after recording just five goals on 80 shots taken over the losses to the Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers and Vancouver Canucks that immediately preceded it. Kaiden Guhle factored in on three of those four goals for his first three-point game in the league, making him the youngest Canadiens defenceman to record as many points in a period since Mathieu Schneider did it in 1990.

And when the 22-year-old’s partner, Mike Matheson, scored the first shorthanded goal of his career — an electric play that started with a blocked shot in his own end and ended with him deking replacement goaltender Joey D’accord out of his pads after burning past Tomas Tatar to get into the clear — it boosted the minus-32 rating he entered the game with up to minus-27 and helped give Trevor Letowski his first win as an NHL head coach to cap Bizarro Night in Seattle.

It was fitting that this 5-1 outcome was achieved as it was on a Sunday — of all nights — after the Canadiens were off the NHL schedule for their first Saturday of the season. 

The only thing that would’ve made it weirder would’ve been Josh Anderson, Jesse Ylonen, Rafael Harvey-Pinard and Collin White combining for all their goals.

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But we’ll bet those guys, who have just three goals between them in 2024, were celebrating just as much as anyone else in the visiting locker room when all was said and done. Because a win is a win, and the Canadiens haven’t had the pleasure of enjoying enough of them of late.

“We needed a game like that just to maybe lift the weight off our shoulders a little bit,” said a very pleased Guhle to reporters at Climate Pledge Arena. 

He also said, “Two points is two points and it felt like it’s been hard to come by for us lately, so maybe it could’ve been the hockey gods giving us some of those…”

It certainly felt like it from our living room.

The Canadiens have deserved better through much of the month and were finally rewarded with a good feeling at the end of a night that saw them soundly out-chanced by a Kraken team that forced Cayden Primeau to come up with 35 saves.

He made a few of the circus variety at the start, including one sensational one on Matty Beniers before Guhle started the scoring spree for the Canadiens. And Primeau saved his best for last, with an eye-popping pad stop on Andre Burakovsky on a third-period Kraken power play.

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When the Canadiens had open looks, they didn’t miss, which had to have felt really different for them considering their season to date.

Their opportunism didn’t feel accidental, though. Letowski told reporters, hours before the puck dropped in Seattle, that the Kraken played a passive defensive style in their own zone he felt the Canadiens could take advantage of, and that’s exactly what they ended up doing as of the fifth minute of the first period. 

Guhle’s weak shot off Kraken defenceman Jamie Oleksiak to open the scoring came after the Canadiens cycled through that passive system and found an opening. Juraj Slafkovsky helped it in, creating the chaos in front of Seattle’s net before it crossed the line.

Alex Newhook scored the first of his two goals with a high-slot tip on another Guhle shot. And before he scored his second one on a bang-bang play, Nick Suzuki flew in two-on-one with Cole Caufield and banked what might have been his most precise shot of the season off the post for his team-leading 28th goal, which chased Kraken goaltender Philipp Grubauer from the game.

As Letowski rightly suggested afterwards, Matheson’s wild rush to make it 5-1 was a lot more important in the moment than it seemed in the end, with the Kraken pressing and threatening to make it a closer contest. He was also dead on in referring to the feeling of earning his first win as Martin St. Louis’s interim replacement as “awkward.”

“It was a memorable week for me because of the way the team rallied around each other, and the staff and players kinda had to just push a little extra just to kinda keep some kind of normalcy, right, when we’re missing our leader,” Letowski said in reference to St. Louis, who’s been attending to a family matter since last Saturday.

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When he looks at the game puck he was given by the players, he’ll always remember the strange circumstances — both over the week and throughout the night — that led to it ending up in his hands.

Letowski isn’t tossing that one away, though, and the Canadiens aren’t giving this win back after not seeing better, more conventional performances rewarded. 

They’re banking the good feeling and hoping to ride momentum into Colorado, for Tuesday’s game at altitude, against the high-flying Avalanche. 

Maybe that one will be a bit more normal than this one was.

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