Montreal fans want this to mean something. It means less than they think.
The Canadiens beat the Blackhawks 4-1 on Friday with Jake Evans scoring twice, Kaiden Guhle adding a goal and an assist, and Mike Matheson capping it with an empty-netter in his first game back from injury. Nick Suzuki, Montreal's captain and leading scorer this season, didn't play. He's out 2-4 weeks with an upper-body injury, the first missed game of his career after a streak that had made him one of the league's true ironmen. So the question going around is simple: did Montreal just show it can win comfortably without its best player, or did it just beat a team that's bad at hockey right now?
It's the second one. Chicago entered the night 3-6-0 and left it 3-7-0, losers of two straight. The Blackhawks went 0-for-5 on the power play and still managed to get stuck on the wrong end of a shorthanded goal while they were on it, which visibly annoyed their own captain, Connor Bedard, who told reporters afterward that his team was giving up odd-man rushes it "can't" give up. Spencer Knight, in net for Chicago, has allowed three or more goals in the bulk of his starts this season and is sitting on a save percentage that would get a backup benched on most rosters. None of that is Montreal doing anything special, it's a struggling team playing a struggling goaltender in front of a power play that couldn't convert if you handed it an empty net.
RatingThrow out the opponent for a second and look at what Montreal did with the lead. This is a team that has made a habit this season of handing games back after building exactly this kind of cushion. Two nights before this game, Montreal blew a 3-1 lead against San Jose and lost in overtime. It wasn't a one-off: the same thing had already happened against Buffalo, twice, in the same shape, a 3-1 lead, then nothing. By the time Guhle's goal made it 3-1 in the second period on Friday, that scoreline had betrayed this roster three times in a week. Evans was asked about it afterward and didn't dodge it. "Yeah, we've been in this position a lot," he said, before adding that the group needed to "play a mature game" in the third. They did, for once. That's a real data point, and nothing more than that.
The credit for this one belongs to specific players. Evans, playing without his captain, earned it. Matheson coming back from a four-game absence and chipping in cleanly is a good sign for the blue line. This result doesn't answer anything about Montreal's larger problem. The pattern dogging this team wasn't tested here. Chicago doesn't have the horses to punish a tight third period. The next team that gets Montreal up 3-1 with a real power play and a goalie who isn't drowning will expose the same problem San Jose and Buffalo already did. Until that team shows up and Montreal still closes the door, nobody gets to say this roster fixed itself on a Friday night in Chicago against the worst team it could have asked for.
