The Montreal Canadiens had a rough week at the office. There is no sugarcoating that.

Losing three straight on home ice, having their power play completely disappear out of nowhere, being unable to complete a pass or handle the puck with any degree of expertise, losing Alex Newhook for four months with a broken ankle, Kaiden Guhle for another eight to 10 weeks with an adductor muscle tear and Kirby Dach for four to six weeks with a fractured foot, none of it looked very good.

But after 18 games, the Canadiens are still 10-6-2. And just as their 10-3-2 start did not tell the entire story, their 0-3-0 week at home does not tell the entire story, either.

The NHL has a way of evening out, and while it was a rather drastic way of doing it, that’s what the Canadiens just experienced.

Take, for instance, a question coach Martin St. Louis fielded after practice last Monday about the Canadiens’ unsustainably high shooting percentage, which was a league-high 15.28 percent in all situations at the time. He was asked if there’s any way for him to prepare for the inevitable drop in that percentage. It was a fair question.

“I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, you know?” he responded. “I’m not going to start planning around it, like, we need to change because, boys, we’re going to start scoring less soon. We have good shooters. For sure, the percentage is high, but the way we behave on the ice, the way we compete, makes it so I’m not worried about our shot volume. We have too big of a sample right now — going back to last season, we’ve never been a big shot volume team. Could we shoot more? Yes. But it’s not a priority.”

The Canadiens’ shooting percentage in all situations this past week? A league-worst 4.05 percent. Regression can be nasty at times.

But despite the horrid shooting week, the Canadiens still lead the league in shooting percentage in all situations at 13.42 percent.

And really, as awful as the 5-1 loss to the Los Angeles Kings and the 7-0 loss to the Dallas Stars were, the Canadiens’ game at five-on-five appeared to somehow take a step forward in those games, as well as the 3-2 loss to the Boston Bruins on Saturday night where an 0-for-7 performance on the power play really sunk the Canadiens.

Score effects likely had a lot to do with the improved numbers for the Canadiens, but at five-on-five, this was actually one of their better weeks of the season, according to Natural Stat Trick.

Canadiens at 5v5 before and after

DatesCF%SF%XGF%HDCF%

Up until Nov. 10

47.7

48.46

49.55

47.52

Nov. 10-17

53.01

54.64

51.25

50

The one big difference? Goals for and goals against, of course. The Canadiens had a 37-28 edge in five-on-five goals heading into the week and were then outscored 10-1 in three games.

It was a market correction, in a way, and though St. Louis could not walk into his dressing room and warn his players they would start scoring far less, this was somewhat foreseeable.

Another question St. Louis was asked after practice Monday, prior to the bloodbath he didn’t know was coming, was about how the NHL’s young stars are starting to take over the scoring race — how Connor Bedard and Macklin Celebrini and Leo Carlsson are imposing their will on the league.

His response, in retrospect, is quite relevant.

“A changing of the guard doesn’t happen every year, so is that where we are?” St. Louis said. “With the small sample we have so far, it seems like it. Will that be the case? We don’t know yet. We’ll have a bigger sample, and that will give us a better idea. You don’t know when it’s going to happen, but you know it’s going to happen. Will that be this year? I don’t know. We’ll see.”

In many ways, this applies to the Canadiens. They had a small sample of success, but an NHL season is long, and roadblocks and adversity and tough times will get in the way.

The Canadiens have hit their first rough patch. They began their week with St. Louis talking about how he was struggling to manage ice time for his forwards because of the unprecedented depth of his team, something complicated by how healthy they were up front.

A lot has changed in a week.

We’re about to find out if the Canadiens are indeed taking part in a changing of the guard in the NHL, or if they were simply a small-sample blip on the radar.

Battle between size and skill

Quinton Byfield chuckled as soon as he heard it.

“That’s a really good question, honestly,” he said.

The Kings centre is listed at 6 feet, 5 inches and 225 pounds. He is a supremely skilled forward with hands to die for. But that frame suggests he is obligated to use more than his skill, more than his speed. He needs to take full advantage of that size.

Sound familiar?

The question we were asking Byfield was how he managed the pressure to use his size and be more physical, when he defines himself more by his skill. Amd the reason we were asking it was because it is the same internal battle Juraj Slafkovský has had to wage over his NHL career. Byfield was the No. 2 pick in the 2020 draft. Slafkovský went No. 1 in 2022. They were drafted that high because of their combination of size and skill.

That combination is what makes them rare. But it requires a bit of a re-definition of their identity as a player.

“It’s a bit of both,” Byfield said. “I find, once you’re a big guy, it’s just go to the net, all this stuff. But for myself, I can do a lot more than that. It’s hard. Obviously you’ve got to do a bit of both. Working down low, be a little bit tougher, but when you’re in open ice, use your skill a little bit more. I feel like it’s a tough battle. I’ll just leave it at that.”

The analogy presented to Byfield was of a young basketball player who is tall and is automatically slated to play centre. Byfield responded that he played point guard as a kid in basketball, but he’s not really allowed to play the hockey equivalent of point guard in the NHL.

“For myself, I try to use a lot more of my speed and skill than my physicality,” Byfield said. “So it’s probably more of finding the consistency of using my size, my reach, physicality. There are games where I use it more than others, and it’s something I want to make more consistent with my game. I just want to use everything and get everything involved and try to be more consistent with that.”

This is the same process Slafkovský is trying to go through: to add an element to his game that he doesn’t feel defines his game. That balance is difficult to find, and it is exemplified in that one line from Byfield that explains the battle perfectly:

“But for myself, I can do a lot more than that.”

Slafkovský’s speed

In the Canadiens’ home game against the Utah Mammoth on Nov. 8, Slafkovský hit not only his top skating speed of the season, but of his NHL career, when he reached 37.07 km/h (23.03 mph) while forechecking Clayton Keller in the Mammoth zone. That speed forced a turnover and allowed the Canadiens to spend some additional time in the offensive zone.

By the time we brought this up to Slafkovský last Monday morning, he had already heard about it from Canadiens director of hockey development Adam Nicholas.

“Yeah, Big Cat sent me that,” he said. “I was asking if they got me in the car on the way home. I wasn’t sure.”

And then Slafkovský wanted to know where he stood.

“What’s the fastest? 24?” he asked.

The fastest speed hit by a skater this season, according to NHL EDGE data, is Connor McDavid at 39.61 km/h, or 24.61 mph.

Slafkovský seemed pleased he at least approached it.

“I was actually surprised, too,” he said. “I felt like we were pushing the pace like we spoke about, we needed to play faster, and I wanted to be part of that. It’s good that I had it. I’m sure it was without the puck, so now I want to do it with the puck.”

Slafkovský worked very hard over the offseason to be sure he would be at his best this season and avoid the slow starts that have defined his NHL career to date. Hitting the highest speed of his career is, in one way, a validation of that work.

In another way, it’s not enough.

Slafkovský wants to stop defining his game by goals and assists. He’s trying to realize there is more to his game than points and that he can contribute to wins in other ways.

It’s a work in progress.

“I feel way better playing,” he said. “I’m just looking for those extra bounces so I can get on the board a little more. Obviously, I’m trying to do everything I can defensively and offensively to help the team, and as long as we keep winning, it’s fine.”

So, getting on the board is still important to him?

“Yeah,” he said with a smile, “I mean, it’s nice to have some cookies.”

From speeding up to slowing down

When we talked with Zack Bolduc on Tuesday morning, he had not registered a shot on goal in two straight games. Two nights later, that streak had grown to four straight games — the longest such streak of his NHL career.

When you have a shot like Bolduc’s, that is not ideal. But finding space to let go of a shot like his, when you are trying to integrate yourself onto a new team, is not necessarily easy.

“These are the best players in the world,” he said.

One thing St. Louis appears to be emphasizing is the concept of controlling your speed. For some players, such as Cole Caufield, it works. Caufield has said that his comprehension of controlling his speed has been one of his most significant improvements under St. Louis. For others, such as Josh Anderson, that has come with a bit more difficulty.

When speed is an important part of your identity, actively reducing your speed can be counterintuitive.

Bolduc admits he is still working on that.

“Yeah, that’s something I’ve already talked about, whether it was with the Blues, or even in junior with guys like Simon Gagné, Patrick Roy, those are guys I talked to about that,” he said. “In St. Louis, I talked about it with Claude Julien, that I didn’t always have to be going 100 miles an hour. I have a certain amount of experience, but there are still things I need to learn in this league.

“You learn things every day. Every time you get on the ice, you might see a situation you’ve never seen before. For me, it still happens regularly that I see situations I haven’t seen a lot. So, it’s about learning, learning and executing. The important thing in this league is to be able to learn and apply it quickly, not need months to adapt to things. It’s something I’ve done well in the past, but it’s something I still need to learn, and I’m learning a lot.”

St. Louis has spoken at length about this concept — how controlling speed is about spacing, about keeping yourself away from a teammate or about recognizing space the opposing team is giving you. It is something that allows you to read the game, and it is something that is hard because you are playing the game on ice.

“It’s easy on blades to just keep going,” he said. “It’s hard to control your speed. And deceleration is as important as acceleration.”

Bolduc knows he needs to improve at this. He is in his second full season in the NHL, and finding ways to unleash his elite shot remains somewhat elusive, even if he snapped his streak Saturday night with three shots on goal against the Bruins.

“There are games where the timing is really good; you feel like everything’s going great. And there are games where the timing is really not good and you feel like you’re playing the game backwards,” Bolduc said Tuesday. “There are nights like that. You just need to approach those nights being conscious of how the puck is rolling for you or how the team is playing, and those are things I’m still learning. We communicate on that, I do video, and they are things I can improve and I’m going to keep improving on.”