According to Moneypuck.com, there were only four forward lines in the NHL that scored more goals at five-on-five this season than Nick Suzuki, Juraj Slafkovský and Cole Caufield. In terms of goals per 60 minutes of ice time among lines who played at least 400 minutes together, they were 10th, which is pretty elite company.
But it is worth remembering Slafkovský began the season paired with Kirby Dach, and the two of them looked great in training camp. Dach’s injury in the second game of the season is probably the single biggest factor in Slafkovský’s poor start.
Back in February, Slafkovský said he “can’t wait for (Dach) to be back and (to) just get to play with him again.”
But last Wednesday, when asked about playing with Suzuki and Caufield, Slafkovský said, “Hopefully it stays that way next year.”
As for Suzuki and Caufield, both of them can recognize how much Slafkovský added to their line.
“We grew a lot this year over the second half, playing together and learning different ways to break teams down,” Caufield said. “Honestly, I’m very impressed with where we’ve come as a line. We’ve seen some good stats about our line and it speaks a lot to how seriously we took this and how we played the full season no matter where we were in the standings.”
Would he be willing to give that up for the good of the team?
“You want to do what’s best for the team,” Caufield said. “If us three working together is working then it shouldn’t be much of an issue keeping us together. But obviously getting Kirby back’s huge, and kind of spread the wealth throughout the lineup. I’m just excited for next year. There’s a lot more options at forward and obviously you want to play with those two for a long time.”
Dach’s return is perhaps the biggest wild card in the Montreal Canadiens’ playoff aspirations for next season. If he comes back and picks up where he left off, the Canadiens have the building blocks of two legitimate scoring lines up front. But if he doesn’t, they don’t, depending of course on what additions are made in the offseason.
It’s difficult to take that seamless return to play after an entire missed season for granted.
“I think it goes without saying we missed him a lot this year in so many situations because of how good of a player he is,” Mike Matheson said. “It’s just a testament to how good he is. He can control the puck so well and create so much for all the other players on the ice because of all the attention he brings to himself with the puck. So the easiest way to say it is we missed him a lot.”
Putting Dach and Slafkovský together has the potential of creating a big, physically imposing and highly skilled line. But allowing Slafkovský to continue the growth he showed with Suzuki and Caufield has a lot of merit as well.
It will be an interesting summer for Martin St. Louis and his staff to decide which is the best path forward, because it’s been a long time since the Canadiens had one of the most productive lines in the NHL and breaking it up would be a difficult decision to make.
Speaking of Slafkovský’s growth …
Slafkovský was asked if he remembered the feeling of scoring his first goal of the season. It came on Nov. 4 in St. Louis, the first game he played with Suzuki and Caufield, though the goal came while he was playing on the second power-play unit.
It was a moment that stuck with him.
𝓛𝓲𝓿𝓮 𝓢𝓵𝓪𝓯 𝓛𝓸𝓿𝓮#GoHabsGo pic.twitter.com/auFwXQQIz0
— Canadiens Montréal (@CanadiensMTL) November 4, 2023
“I was just super frustrated before that, so it put a little bit of weight off my shoulders,” he said. “After, it still wasn’t great, but I just felt better, felt a little more confident, a little better on the puck. I think it only went good since that day.”
That is the framing for what Slafkovský felt was the biggest lesson he learned this season.
“Just stick to progress and don’t get frustrated along the way,” he said. “Stay patient. Probably the patience is the main thing because I think I wanted so many things at the same time before, but now I realize I can just take my time and work on everything.”
And playing with Suzuki was a big part of him learning that patience.
“He’s the captain and a great guy,” Slafkovský said. “Just talking to him, he’s always so calm and patient, I feel like. And just to be around someone that’s like that helps a lot in my opinion. For sure it helped me.”
One of the most important developments in Slafkovský’s game this season was him embracing his playmaking instincts. Despite being told from all sides that he needed to shoot more, Slafkovský is a playmaker at his core and he showed it this season. His boost in confidence following that goal in St. Louis allowed him to stick with those playmaking instincts that are at the core of who he is as a player.
“It was more like, shooting more was just for my confidence back then. Just shoot the puck, shoot the puck,” he said. “But I don’t know, somewhere deep inside of me, I felt like I could make plays. Then I started shooting a little bit more and that brought more confidence to my game that I was even able to make plays because I was becoming more of a shot threat, so then I can make a play after that if I decide not to shoot.”
Another important development for Slafkovský was how he learned to use his body to shield pucks and create time and space for himself to make those plays.
“(Adam Nicholas) was showing me clips, sending me different players doing it,” he said.
Nicholas, the Canadiens’ director of hockey development, does this all the time with every player in the organization. Slafkovský joked toward the end of the season that Nicholas even sent him clips of Patrick Kane, which shows the extent to which his vision of Slafkovský’s potential is not limited by his size.
But he also sent clips of a player that is roughly the same size as Slafkovský and uses his body — more specifically his broad back — extremely well to create offensive opportunities.
“Auston Matthews. I watch him and he’s pretty good with his spatial awareness,” Slafkovský said. “He uses his back a lot, and he’s pretty much the same size as me — obviously a better player — but he was the one I watched the most. Then we played against him and he did it to me, so I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that can work.’”
Slafkovský learning how to be patient, learning how to effectively use his body, learning how to trust his playmaking instincts, all of it speaks to his commitment to becoming a better NHL hockey player. He is an intense competitor and is intensely ambitious, and this season has shown how those intangible qualities have led to tangible results, not only for him but for his team, which is what is most important to him.
“I just want to be the best every time, and I’m going to work until I finish my goals,” he said. “I want to be the best, but I want to be best for this team to help this team to be successful. I feel like if you have a team achievement, it also brings your value up.”
Nick Suzuki would be more than willing to help if management sought his input on the offseason. (Joel Auerbach / NHLI via Getty Images)
Suzuki is on board for players taking ownership
Suzuki was asked Wednesday how much he feels the future of the Canadiens is rooted in defence, and his answer said a lot about how Suzuki observes the game.
“There’s a lot of draft capital in our D-corps,” he said. “There’s a lot of young players with a lot of potential.”
Draft capital. Players don’t generally use terms like that. Management does. But Suzuki takes in a lot of league news. He watches trade deadline coverage, he tracks the draft. He doesn’t shut it off in the offseason.
General manager Kent Hughes said during his press conference Wednesday he would like his players to “take ownership” of the team, something he has said before.
“It’s their team,” he said. “How will they progress as a team.”
Well, if he wants ownership, Suzuki is down.
When asked to address how the Canadiens will handle heightened expectations, he spoke with authority.
“I think we’ve got the right personalities in the group, guys don’t really look into expectations too much,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of confident guys that like to be in the spotlight and like to play in the big markets and that’s what we need as a group. It’s a passionate franchise and we want to be in those moments in the playoffs and win a lot of games. I think we’ve got the group to do that.”
Later, he added, “I like the expectations and to put pressure on myself. So this is a perfect situation for me to bring out the best in me.”
That sounds a lot like a player taking ownership, and that it’s the captain only makes it that much more impactful. But if Hughes is looking for the ultimate ownership, if he’s looking for a player who wants to be involved in offseason decisions and provide feedback, Suzuki is on board for that as well.
“Yeah, I don’t know how much input they want from the players, but I’ll meet with them later today and we’ll talk about a lot of stuff,” he said. “But I’d love to be in that position, I think I know guys around the league pretty well playing against them. Any way I can help make our team better, I’ll definitely try to.”
There have often been players described as player-coaches because of how much they help sell the coach’s message to his teammates. We don’t often hear about player-managers, but if there was one player who could make that term a thing, it would probably be Suzuki. He looks at the game like a manager more than a coach.
Cole Caufield at last acknowledged the possibility his recovery from shoulder surgery might have played a factor in his goal totals this season. (Vincent Ethier / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Candid talk on Caufield’s shoulder
During the season, Caufield was asked a few times about his surgically repaired shoulder and how it might be impacting his goal totals, and he dismissed it pretty quickly. No player wants to be seen as making excuses in the middle of the season, particularly when discussing an underperformance of some sort.
But with the season over, a bit more honesty is sometimes possible.
When he underwent the surgery last season, we found a study on arthroscopic labral surgery in NHL players that concluded “Players exhibited significant reductions in game use and performance at one season after injury but returned closer to baseline after 3 seasons.”
On Wednesday we had a chance to ask Caufield about that study and whether he was given any of that information or something similar when he had his surgery, that a dip in performance in his first year back was at least a possibility.
“You know, based on the surgery I got, it’s not like different ones where you can get that back right away. I knew that going in, but I don’t think that’s a reason why I wasn’t scoring,” Caufield said. “But for sure, it feels better now than it did at the start of the season, like, trusting it and doing all those things. It feels good now, and I think going forward we should have no issues and just looking forward for next year.”
He still wasn’t thrilled to blame the surgery for anything, but there was a little admission that it might have been a factor. And looking at his goal locations gives an indication of that. We wrote recently about how many more goals Caufield scored from around the net this season based on NHL Edge data, and he ultimately finished with 20 of his 28 goals coming from close to the net.
Getting to the net, as we noted, was something St. Louis wanted to focus on changing in Caufield’s game, and that was a success. But the flip side is that only eight of Caufield’s goals came from the midrange areas of the ice this season, and those goals came on 160 shots, a shooting percentage from that area of 5 percent (we’ve included the two flanks outside the dot lines even though Edge data doesn’t consider those to be midrange shots).
Last season from the midrange, again including the flanks, Caufield scored 13 goals on 72 shots, a shooting percentage of 18.1 percent.
Basically, Caufield shot more frequently from those areas of the ice (1.95 shots per game this season compared to 1.57 per game last season) and scored far less frequently. If Caufield had the same shooting percentage from those areas of the ice this season as he had last season, he would have scored 29 goals from the midrange instead of eight and would have finished the season with 49 goals instead of 28.
But improving his production in tight will look that much better if he’s able to find his shooting touch from further out next season, and perhaps his shoulder being another year removed from surgery could help that.
“I think if I bring those two together hopefully the total adds up, and we win more games,” Caufield said. “At the end of the day, I want to do what I can to help the team and continue to get better and grow my game for the team. I’m excited with where my game’s at, obviously more to come. But if I can mesh those two together, that would be pretty good.”
Then, he laughed.
But the reality is Caufield has scored from those midrange areas his whole life. The one difference this year was that shoulder. So it’s not a stretch to believe he will get back to shooting far better than 5 percent from those spots, and if he can continue getting goals in the paint, that creates a path to a 40-goal season, if not better.
Interesting stats that came out of awards voting
The Professional Hockey Writers Association’s ballots for NHL awards voting were due Friday, and in doing some research, a couple of interesting stats came to light involving the Canadiens.
One of the stats I like to look at in Norris Trophy voting is expected goals against per 60 minutes of five-on-five ice time relative to a player’s teammates. In other words, how does that number change when he’s off the ice? In looking at that stat, Evolving Hockey showed Kaiden Guhle finished eighth among NHL defencemen who played at least 1,000 minutes at five-on-five this season.
What was more interesting about that stat is when it came to actual goals against per 60 relative to his teammates, Guhle was 14th-worst among those same defencemen. The only other player on that list who had a bigger disparity between his expected goals and actual goals was San Jose Sharks defenceman Mario Ferraro, who was seventh-worst in actual goals against relative to his teammates and was 11th-best in expected goals against.
In the case of both Guhle and Ferraro, the expected goals numbers are probably closer to the truth than the actual goal numbers.
I did the same exercise as part of my Selke Trophy research, and again, a couple of interesting names came up. In terms of expected goals relative to teammates, Suzuki was ninth in the NHL among forwards with 1,000 minutes of five-on-five ice time. But more surprising was when looking at actual goals against relative to teammates, Caufield was 12th, just ahead of Sebastian Aho.
None of these stats say a whole lot in a vacuum, but they are an indication that the team is better off defensively with them on the ice than they are with them on the bench.
(Top photo of Cole Caufield, Nick Suzuki and Juraj Slafkovský: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
