How Do the Habs Fix The Defence?

According to Pierre McGuire, who co-hosted Sunday’s episode of the Sick Podcast Post-game show with Tony Marinaro along with special guest Chris Pronger, believe that the majority of the Habs defensemen are looking to create offensive chances rather than play a solid defensive game right now. For example, on the game-winning goal on Sunday, Lane Hutson looked to cheat defensively on the play to start an offensive rush, which led to him getting caught flat-footed when Ryan Poehling made a pass to Cutter Gauthier, who was left all alone in the slot for a goal. Before that, Jacob Fowler made a couple of huge saves to keep the game tied, but with the defence continuing to implode, it was bound to happen that the Ducks would score.

The reality is the Habs are a young, exciting offensive team whose top defenseman is an offensive-minded player, and more often than not it works out, but it will also happen often that he will make defensive errors that cost his team when attempting to transition to offence in his own zone.

To make matters worse for Hutson, right now his defensive pairing with Kaiden Guhle isn’t working because his partner can’t seem to play up to the level that he has in the past since returning from a groin injury in the past 2 months. With that being said, Hutson can’t cheat and take chances as much as he used to alongside Guhle or when he was playing with Noah Dobson. In fact, the only reason he isn’t with Dobson anymore is that they needed to break up the pairing of Guhle and Mike Matheson, as neither of them could play on the right side. Meanwhile, Hutson can play on either side; despite being a left-handed player, the pairing with Guhle can be possible. Unfortunately, with the way Guhle has been playing, Hutson can’t play his normal way of cheating a little bit on defence.

It seems like the situation that could help the Habs is to get Hutson to realize he must stay on his side of the ice and not worry about needing to create offence every single shift so that he doesn’t get caught in his own zone as he did on Sunday. However, at the same time, Guhle needs to get back to being his physical self, as the Canadiens don’t have anyone who can clear the net with a physical presence consistently.

Maybe Arber Xhekaj could do that, but he needs to get his coach’s confidence by avoiding taking penalties and playing error-free hockey. As it stands, the Canadiens need Guhle to be that guy like they know he can in front of the net. Right now it’s really easy for opponents in front of the net; they need to make sure to make life more difficult for their opponents.

On top of that, the forwards are often also out of position on offence. The main issue clearly seems to be that the team isn’t dedicated to playing proper defence and making it easy for their opponents. They need to start focusing more on that side of the game, as the guests like Chris Pronger and Brian Wilde said on Sunday’s episode of the Sick Podcast; the team will get their chances. There may be a few issues with what they have on defence, such as Alexandre Carrier being tasked with boxing out guys in front of the net, but that could be avoided if Carrier instead were used with a bigger guy to box the opponents. Unfortunately, nobody is willing to play that role outside him.

For now, they need to get back to basics and just play a solid responsible game, starting with Tuesday’s game against the Boston Bruins. From there if everyone is focused on playing defence-first, things may start to turn around.

Do you think that the Canadiens are too focused on trying to create offence?