BROSSARD, Que.— It’s been missing from Mike Matheson’s game so far this season, and if he and the Montreal Canadiens keep it up, it’ll remain that way.
Yes, we’re referring to the egregious turnover.
Matheson knows he committed too many of them last season.
But he also knows hockey’s a team sport, and that the Canadiens spent most of last season figuring out how to play it the way they’ve been playing it so far this season.
So far this season, the Canadiens, who are 9-3-0, have really been playing like a team. They’ve been connected in all three zones, making them much more predictable to each other. And that predictability has played a huge hand in Matheson nailing his risk-reward calculation as precisely as possible through 12 games, over which he’s arguably been Montreal’s most effective player.
The 31-year-old deserves credit, too. He’s been as on top of his game as he’d have hoped going into the season.
But Matheson knows he’d have to be calculating his risk a lot more if his teammates weren’t as well-positioned as they have been all over the ice.
“I think that definitely helps anybody,” Matheson said in an interview with Sportsnet Monday. “The better the team is playing, the more connected it is, the easier it is, especially as a defenceman. There’s way less time being spent having to choose between the safer of two options, so I think there’s a lot of value in that.”
He said the connectivity of Montreal’s players is “night and day compared to last season,” making the jobs he and Matheson must do that much easier.
They were painfully hard at the start of last October when the Canadiens were completely disconnected and therefore completely unpredictable to each other.
Chaos ensued in the defensive zone, and Matheson would be the first to admit he extended it at times by forcing certain plays while overthinking others.
But when he’s on the ice now, the puck is barely getting deep enough into the defensive zone for chaos to affect his process.
A lot of the time, it’s not getting into the defensive zone at all, and that’s because Matheson ranks first in the NHL in neutral-zone denials, according to SportLogiq.
He also ranks eighth among all players in denying controlled zone entries.
“I think that says a lot about his feet, his quickness, and his lateral movement,” said Cole Caufield.
Matheson feels it says a lot about the way the Canadiens are playing, and that it says just as much about the support Noah Dobson has given him as his defence partner.
“I credit a lot of it to him,” said Matheson. “I think he’s a really easy player to play with. I just feel like he’s always so in control of what he’s doing, and that makes him a really easy player to read off. He makes a lot of great plays with the puck, and then he’s always in the right spot without the puck where I can rely on him.”
It takes the thinking out of the equation, which only helps with the risk-reward calculation.
Matheson struggled with that from time to time last season. Much more so than he wanted to, but also much less so than he was given credit for on social media, where the one or two errors he’d make per game were seemingly cancelling out all the good he was doing.
There was a lot of good, with Matheson accepting to move from the first power-play unit to the first penalty-killing unit and from offensive defenceman to top shutdown defenceman just one season removed from producing 62 points. He played the most minutes, he played the hardest minutes in the hardest matchups, and he played them as well as he possibly could to help the Canadiens to an unexpected playoff berth.
But with the mistakes often glaring and sometimes costly, the social media discourse around his game was frustratingly myopic.
Even if Matheson tried to avoid it, he couldn’t.
But the player was still able to keep that discourse in perspective.
“I’m definitely the hardest person on me in the entire world,” the Pointe-Claire, Que., native said. “At the same time, I think there’s opinions out there where people have just sort of made up their mind about me and those opinions became trendy. Opinions are very trendy at times in this market, where someone will say one thing and it snowballs where, all of a sudden, it’s the go-to thought. And then it takes a long time for that to be reversed.
“There are definitely times where I’m mad at myself for the way I played, just as anybody else would be. But the narrative about me has gone on longer than my actual game has warranted at times.”
The narrative that Matheson costs the Canadiens more than he gives them has been completely silenced for now, even if nothing about his game is particularly different.
He averaged a team-leading 25:05 last season and is averaging a team-leading 24:53 this season. He took on the hardest assignments at five-on-five, started 90 per cent of his shifts outside the offensive zone, played the majority of every two-minute penalty kill, and he continues to do all of that while producing and serving as one of the biggest factors in the Canadiens winning more games than they lose.
What’s changed considerably is how the team is playing around Matheson.
“We’re connected to the point where even if the other team makes a good read and cuts off a play we’re trying to make, we’re all in the right spots to recover,” said Hutson. “I think everyone’s really fallen into the structure really good.”
Experience and maturity are factors in that.
Continuity, according to Matheson, might be the most relevant factor.
“The continuity (in personnel) has helped a lot,” he said. “But the continuity of the coaching staff has really helped a lot, too. For myself, this is the longest I’ve ever been with one coaching staff. This is my fourth year with this coaching staff and, before that, I’d never been more than two years with any coaching staff. It makes a big difference. The message has been consistent. We’ve changed little things as we’ve gone along, but the message has been streamlined and similar over the last few years, which helps a lot.”
Nothing helps more than the players receiving the message and properly applying it.
“They see what we’re doing, and see the successful results the process has produced,” said Matheson. “Surpassing expectations by making the playoffs last year created total buy-in from every single player, and that’s ultimately what makes a team good. It’s not necessarily a 1-2-2 that’s going to beat a 1-3-1 every single time, or a man-up forecheck that’s going to be beat this or that scheme; it’s really about every player being so bought into a scheme and executing it at a very high level consistently, and I feel like we really have that buy-in.”
It’s enabling the individuals to shine, Matheson included.
His three goals, four assists and plus-7 rating tell part of that story.
Having only 12 giveways, with none of them being particularly memorable, tells another.
Not that Matheson expects to be perfect, and not that anyone should expect him to be.
“It’s a game of mistakes, and pretty much every shift there’s some kind of mistake that happens, so you can’t get caught up in each one of them, even if some people watching do,” Matheson said. “It’s so funny how, oftentimes, to understand what happened on a certain play, what do you have to do? You have to go back and look at the replay. You have the snap-of-a-finger amount of time to figure out what to do and execute it under pressure, though. Everyone can have that reaction watching a replay and saying, ‘Oh, what was he thinking?’”
Matheson doesn’t have time for dwelling on mistakes, or the past.
“I’m personally focused on each game at a time,” he said. “I’m not worried about what I did in the last game, or worried about what I did in games last year. I’m just thinking about what my matchup is going to be for the next game, a couple of things I’d like to continue to implement in my game that I’ve been working on, a couple of things to continue to get better at and tighten up, and just bring all that into the next one.”
That process is working well for Matheson, and for the Canadiens, and they’re sticking to it to keep the lowlights to a minimum.
