The Canadian spent his Wednesday practice throwing into empty nets or into nets covered with carpet with small holes.
The idea, of course, was to allow the players to regain healthy confidence, even more so after Tuesday night’s game at the Bell Center, in which the guys in blue, white and red only managed one goal. . “You have to start somewhere…confidence is a big part of it,” Juraj Slafkovsky said with a smile of throwing pucks at nets without any goalies.
It should be remembered that the Canadian players have not managed a match with more than two goals in regular time in their last four outings. We won’t go over the (very) long list of players on this team who are down offensively at the moment, but Martin St-Louis summed it all up in a single sentence on Wednesday in Brossard. “It’ll help when a couple of guys unlock,” he explained.
This is indeed the biggest problem for this team at the moment: there are guys who are blocked, a problem undoubtedly purely Montreal, like the city’s arteries, but we get lost.
Martin St-Louis did not name him, but we presume that Cole Caufield is one of those who must unlock, he who has only managed one goal at five on five since the start of the season.
Wednesday in the middle of the locker room, the young striker had the same smile when declaring that “sooner or later, she’s going to get in there”, and he claims not to worry too much about that.
“Obviously it’s frustrating… We all want to be able to score every night,” he began by saying. We want to help the team win matches. But at the end of the day, I get scoring chances.
“It’s frustrating, yes, but you get up the next day, start again, and try again next time. We learn from these experiences, we learn to deal with adversity. That’s what I’m doing at the moment… The goals will come eventually, I like how I play five against five. »
While everyone here is talking about an offensive breakdown and those who are not capable of putting it into it, Martin St-Louis, for his part, sees the glass half full; among other things, he talked about his club’s last four games: “[perhaps] our best series of four games since I arrived here”, he analyzed.
But he spoke of trust, too.
“It’s a bit of the confidence of certain players that is in question, and there’s a little bit of bad luck too,” he added. But we generate enough scoring chances to win… I know we want to score more goals, and it will help when a couple of guys unlock.
“But the guys are in a good place from a psychological point of view; They are disappointed with Tuesday night’s result, that’s normal, but we’re moving forward… The guys feel it on the ice. The only thing that is difficult for us right now is putting the puck in the net. »
This is why they spent more than an hour throwing into empty nets or onto nets covered with a mat with small holes. It remains to be seen if they can score when there is a goalie in front of the net.
