SEATTLE — Dominique Ducharme likes to say how a hockey team is like a puzzle. At least, his teams are.
Every facet of the game fits together. You need to start with some corner pieces, he said during training camp, and start building from there. But if you are missing the corner pieces, figuring out where the other pieces fit becomes more difficult. At the time, Ducharme was explaining how one of the corner pieces of the Canadiens’ game is their ability to kill plays, how that feeds into their transition game, and how that leads to offence.
Defence to transition to offence. Pretty simple puzzle.
Or at least it should be. But for the Canadiens this season, that puzzle always seems to be missing a corner piece.
And one of the missing corner pieces was immediately evident, right from the start of their 5-1 loss to the Seattle Kraken on Tuesday. It was the Kraken’s second home game, and the expansion franchise was looking for its first win in its spectacular new arena in front of fans who will have trouble finding any fault in their team this season.
The simple fact that the Kraken exist will likely be enough for them. But it’s not enough for the Kraken players, and the Canadiens knew that. They knew the Kraken would come out hard, they knew they would play with desperation and urgency, because even though external expectations don’t necessarily place a heavy burden on these players, they are competitors, they are NHL players and almost all of them were deemed expendable by their previous teams. They have something to prove.
The Canadiens don’t have the same luxury of relying solely on internal expectations.
