Key Canadiens make waves as Josh Anderson's absence causes ripple effect

By / / Sports / 7 minutes of reading


MONTREAL — Oliver Kapanen got the call at roughly 3:30 p.m., less than four hours before the scheduled puck drop Saturday for the Montreal Canadiens home game against the Philadelphia Flyers.

Forward Josh Anderson would be unavailable because he needed to attend to the biggest day of his life — his wife expecting the couple’s first child — and thus, Kapanen was in, all of a sudden.

Anderson, just a year after suffering through a season where he felt like a meaningless player, is now the opposite of that. His coach considers him a “culture driver” for his team, and with Anderson naturally preoccupied with more important matters, Martin St. Louis needed to jump into action.

Anderson’s absence had a ripple effect throughout the Canadiens’ lineup in this critical game — because the Canadiens no longer have non-critical games on their schedule — and their ability to pull out a 3-2 victory without their culture driver was in large part because of how some of those ripples impacted the game.

“I talk about what’s next, right? That was what’s next for me as a coach,” St. Louis said after the game. “The player’s not going to be here, and as a group we talked about it, we’re going to play hard for Andy. We can’t replace what Andy does just with one guy, it’s by committee that we’ve got to bring some of that stuff. Andy gives us a lot of juice. I think our team feeds off his energy.

“I thought collectively we did a pretty good job of that.”

This is what made the Canadiens’ reaction to Anderson’s joyous absence emblematic of what this team has become. It is a collective.

Here is how some of the individual parts of that collective gave the Canadiens a 4-point cushion for a playoff spot they so desperately want.

Oliver Kapanen

Kapanen played his final playoff game for Timrå IK on March 31, a 1-0 loss to Frölunda HC that knocked Timrå out of the Swedish Hockey League playoffs.

The next day, Kapanen got the call from the Canadiens.

Kapanen left that day, traveling from Timrå to Stockholm to Munich to Montreal, roughly 24 hours of travel that allowed him to arrive in town late on Wednesday. He was on the ice for the Canadiens’ morning skate the following day.

Then suddenly, without the benefit of a full practice, Kapanen was in the lineup Saturday night.

“It wasn’t that hard to prepare to play on a Saturday night here,” he said.

Kapanen’s last game in a Canadiens uniform was Nov. 5, a game remarkably similar to this one but different in one very meaningful way.

The Canadiens had a 4-7-1 record at the time, they had lost three games in a row, they had endured a brutal bag skate in Washington four days earlier, but they had a 2-1 lead in the third period against the Calgary Flames.

Brendan Gallagher scored the Canadiens’ opening goal in that game to erase a 1-0 deficit, just as he did Saturday night. Joel Armia scored a short-handed goal in that game, just as Nick Suzuki did Saturday night, a goal that turned out to be the game winner.

But the Canadiens lost that November game when they allowed a goal to Matt Coronato with less than three minutes remaining in regulation when Jake Evans lost him in defensive zone coverage, and Coronato scored again in overtime.

They loaned Kapanen to Timrå the next day, and he didn’t play for the Canadiens again until Saturday night.

This is why no one was better placed to comment on the growth of the Canadiens since his last game in that uniform, of how things have changed in Montreal, particularly in their ability to hang on and win a game they likely would have lost back then.

“Of course you can see we’re playing for big points at the moment,” Kapanen said. “Right now, there’s a great push on the team and they’ve been winning, finding ways to win games.

“I think when I was here the first time, we would just find a way to lose the game. But now the team finds a way to win those, so that’s a good sign.”

Jake Evans

When Kapanen entered the lineup, he slotted in at centre on the fourth line because the man who would normally be there was moving up to replace Anderson on what had been the Canadiens’ second-best line for weeks.

St. Louis could not afford to let Anderson’s absence diminish what he had been getting from Christian Dvorak and Gallagher, so he put Evans with them and left Kapanen to centre Armia and Michael Pezzetta.

All Evans did was set up Gallagher for his 20th goal of the season early in the third period, erasing the Flyers’ 1-0 lead and blowing the roof off Bell Centre.

That goal came after Evans had set up Dvorak for a chance in the slot in the second period that was labelled for the top corner of the net before Flyers goalie Sam Ersson snagged it with his glove.

Evans didn’t replace everything Anderson provides, but he accomplished the mission of keeping that line effective.

“We love when Andy’s in the lineup, he brings that pace and energy and hits everything,” Cole Caufield said. “It’s tough to have him out. But I thought everybody stepped up and brought a little bit of his game to theirs.

“This one was for him tonight.”

Nick Suzuki

With Anderson gone, Suzuki was left to take his minutes on the penalty kill — on top of the massive minutes he plays at five-on-five. Shortly after the Flyers went up 1-0, Alexandre Carrier was given a double-minor for high-sticking Matvei Michkov. It could have been a disaster for the Canadiens.

Suzuki played three shifts on the four-minute penalty kill.

“That four-minutes kill could have gone the other way for us, but the kill stepped up,” Suzuki said. “It got more chances for us, probably, than they had.”

Then in the third period, once again killing a penalty with the Canadiens clinging to a 2-1 lead, and just after Sam Montembeault made a series of saves on Sean Couturier to maintain that lead, Suzuki added to it with the winning goal.

Suzuki’s goal and assist on Lane Hutson’s sixth goal of the season — an end-to-end rush that finished with a top-shelf snipe from the goal line that defied logic — gave Suzuki 83 points this season, ensuring he will be a point-per-game player for the first time in his career, and the first to do it in a Canadiens uniform since Alex Kovalev had 84 points in 2007-08.

To put that in perspective, Suzuki was 8 years old at the time, Caufield was 7, Kapanen was 5, Hutson and Juraj Slafkovský were 4.

Suzuki has 9 points in his last four games and 31 points in 20 games since the return from the 4 Nations break.

He is driving the Canadiens’ bus with incredible skill, and it is impressing everyone around him.

“It’s unreal,” Caufield said. “The way he’s able to pick our group up and lead the way every night has been special. With (Anderson) out, he’s on the kill now, and he’s just able to step up. I’m not sure how many minutes he was out there tonight (22:09), but it could have been 25, 30, the guy just wouldn’t stop.

“He’s just the best player on our team, there’s no doubt about that. He’s been unbelievable.”

The Canadiens winning a game so similar to one they lost back when Kapanen was last in the lineup allowed them to open a 4-point gap for the final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference, thanks to the New York Rangers losing in regulation to the New Jersey Devils on Saturday afternoon. The Canadiens have 83 points and the Rangers have 79 with both teams having six games remaining. The Columbus Blue Jackets also lost, to the Toronto Maple Leafs, leaving them and the Detroit Red Wings 6 points back with each having seven games left.

The Canadiens improved to 12-4-4 since the return from the 4 Nations break.

“It’s been fun to do it with this group of guys,” Caufield said. “Things could have went either way at the (trade) deadline, things could have went either way after the break. To do it with these guys and work through these ups and downs — we had two long stretches of tough hockey, and we found a way to dig out of those. So just keep going, keep putting our foot on the gas. It’s not over yet.”

But then Caufield had one more thing he wanted to add in summarizing how the Canadiens recovered from a slow start to win a game they had to have. It is something that seems to define this group and, whether they make the playoffs or not, will likely resonate for years.

“We weren’t going to accept defeat,” he said. “Even up until the end, battling five-on-six, four-on-six … those guys, they battled right to the end. (Montembeault) was great again.

“I just love this squad.”

(Photo of Oliver Kapanen forechecking against Cam York: Eric Bolte / Imagn Images)





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