MONTREAL — The Montreal Canadiens are a young team. The youngest in the league. This is not a news flash.
But when you are the coach of the youngest team in the league, and you lean on the few veterans you have to try to mitigate that abundance of youth, you have a tendency to protect those veterans. It’s a natural instinct.
On Tuesday morning, Martin St. Louis was asked a question about Brendan Gallagher, and another about Jake Evans, two of those trusted veterans who have been struggling. And in both cases, St. Louis talked about the team’s play around them.
Evans entered the game with a team-worst minus-12 rating this season, which is a bad look for a centre whose primary job is to defend and not get scored on. It’s a difficult job, particularly when you start the vast majority of your shifts in the defensive zone. But the Canadiens still entered Tuesday’s 5-2 loss to the Ottawa Senators having scored seven goals with Evans on the ice at five-on-five and having allowed 18.
“I think as a group,” St. Louis said Tuesday morning, “I think our defensive game has lacked consistency.”
Evans finished the game with a minus-3 rating and watched the majority of the third period from the bench as Joe Veleno essentially filled his role, playing seven shifts for 5:26 of ice time in the third period compared to one minute for Evans.
St. Louis can protect his veterans with his words, but his actions speak louder.
“I think he’s shown us he can kill penalties for us,” St. Louis said of Veleno after the game. “I think he’s a depth player for us and I think that he can fill that chair and it helps us.”
When St. Louis was asked prior to the game about Gallagher, who entered the game with one goal in 24 games, he similarly talked about the team to explain Gallagher lacking the same impact he had last season.
“I feel like we’ve lost a little bit of our identity in the last three or four games,” St. Louis said. “I know we still got some results, but I feel like we’ve lost our identity of being on top of them a little bit. I think that’s going to help Gally’s game a little bit, we talked about that, bringing that back. It’s a little bit on the coaching, a little bit on the players, whatever, we’ve identified that as something we have to get back to. Just start being more on our toes, and when Gally’s on his toes I think he’s able to bring his game. I think I expect the conversation we had as a team, that’s going to help Gally.”
St. Louis’ conversation with his team was about its play in the neutral zone. The lost identity was in reference to its ability to pressure the puck in the neutral zone, to be on top of the opposition, to force turnovers and force dump-ins so the Canadiens can play less in the defensive zone.
For the most part, those conversations bore fruit. The Canadiens were better in the neutral zone against the Senators.
But when down two goals in the third period, Gallagher got dumped by Nick Jensen in the offensive zone, and looked directly at the closest referee, wondering why there was no call. As he made his way toward the defensive zone, Gallagher dumped Jensen, and the referee’s arm went up. Meanwhile, the Senators had the puck in the Canadiens zone, and as Gallagher and Senators goaltender Linus Ullmark each made their way to the bench, Brady Tkachuk scored the dagger goal that made it 5-2, putting the game out of reach for the Canadiens.
There were only four red sweaters in the Canadiens’ zone when Tkachuk scored. The game was within reach until this happened.
The chorus of boos is really the cherry on top here 🎶#GoSensGo pic.twitter.com/Yg5NDWiKqo
— Ottawa Senators (@Senators) December 3, 2025
It was not a veteran moment for Gallagher.
This is not to pin the loss solely on Evans or Gallagher. The Canadiens were a mess in their own zone. The Senators scored four of their five goals from the home-plate area, with little to no opposition. Evans was in no-man’s land on the Senators’ first goal by Fabian Zetterlund; Zack Bolduc was there on their second goal by Artem Zub and even on their third goal by Jake Sanderson. In addition to Evans, Jayden Struble and Lane Hutson were also a minus-3.
“Honestly, I’ve got to watch them, because I was on the ice for three of them,” Struble said. “But yeah, we were leaving the slot open. I would pick my head up and the slot was open and they would score. I don’t really know. I’ve got to watch what happened.”
The Canadiens entered the game wanting to clean up their neutral zone, and they did that for the most part. But you plug one leak, and another one pops up, like a Looney Tunes cartoon.
At one point this season, the third period was an issue for the Canadiens. Once they cleaned that up, the second period became the issue. The neutral zone is an issue, you clean that up, and the defensive zone becomes an issue.
“I thought recently we lost our aggressiveness a little bit, guys are kind of deferring to sitting in our one-two-two when there’s opportunities to pressure,” captain Nick Suzuki said. “Even defensively, I think we’re a bit hesitant where we were killing plays before and not letting them breathe. I think we wanted to get back to that. I thought our neutral zone was better for sure. In Colorado, they just swung around and picked us apart, and that didn’t really happen tonight. It was a good adjustment for sure.”
And the defensive zone tonight?
“I thought we just let them get some easy ones, guys just standing out in front with nobody around them,” Suzuki said. “That’s not very good for us.”
His words trailed off into a whisper as he finished saying that.
The Canadiens have had a good season despite this steady stream of leaks that need plugging and new leaks that appear once others have been plugged. They have been far from perfect and still sit in a decent spot in the standings and a good position to make the playoffs.
Atlantic Division standings
That’s encouraging in a sense, because the Canadiens have much more to give. Once they put it all together, they should be in good shape.
But they clearly haven’t put it all together yet.
“It’s frustrating,” said Juraj Slafkovský, who played a season-high 22:34 and scored his eighth goal of the season to open the scoring. “We fix one thing and then another thing slips a bit, and it shouldn’t be like that.
“It’s up to every single guy in here to make sure, even if we change a little bit of our system, that we are still sharp with the other things that we have to do. No matter what.”
This is the challenge for a young team. St. Louis refused to accept that as an excuse after the game — because no self-respecting team would accept that as an excuse.
But being a young team becomes that much more challenging when one of your most reliable veterans is sitting on the bench in crunch time and another is taking an undisciplined penalty at a critical moment of a game still within reach.
It’s difficult for St. Louis to say that into a microphone, but that’s reality.
Because the Canadiens are the youngest team in the league. That’s not a news flash. But some of their veterans need to understand that.
