Martin St. Louis proved this season he’s steering Canadiens in the right direction

MONTREAL — A losing Canadiens season ends with hope.

Even with this team dropping its final game 5-4 in a shootout to a Detroit Red Wings team playing with its season on the line on Tuesday, even with it finishing just eight points ahead of where it was a year ago, and even with it clinging to 27th place in the NHL and possibly slipping to 28th by Wednesday night, it is present.

And Martin St. Louis is its beacon.

We can talk about the growth of so many of his players, but the coach’s ability to bring the Canadiens together and inspire them to believe in what they were doing — in spite of them trending towards, and eventually achieving, a 30-36-16 record — is the biggest reason for hope to be present.

“He’s our leader, it starts there,” said Brendan Gallagher. “He has a ton of belief. I’m not joking with you guys that when we needed to win probably our last 18 games in a row, he believed we were going to make the playoffs. This is someone who has an incredible belief in what we’re building in our group, and as a player it feels amazing to play for a guy like that because he’s all in. He wants it just as bad as we do. He puts in the work, he puts in the time, and, as players, that’s something you really appreciate.”

Without it, it’s impossible to fathom there would’ve been any real progress made by this group.

But there was some, and it wasn’t just in the collective.

St. Louis’s influence on nearly every player was positive.

Consider what it did for the 31-year-old Gallagher.

The coach worked tirelessly with him to adapt his game while helping him maintain his identity as a player. He never abandoned the process, even when it appeared most difficult at mid-season. And look at where it led Gallagher in the end.

He registered a goal and an assist in this final game to make it 10 points over his last eight, he redeemed hope that he could fill a role he’s much more suited towards as this team acquires more talent, and he was full of gratitude for the work St. Louis did with him to help him take a good feeling into the summer.

No one had a bigger influence on making 20-year-old Juraj Slafkovsky carry a good feeling forward than St. Louis. No one enabled him to access the exceptional talent that saw him chosen first overall in the 2022 NHL Draft more.

When the kid was at his lowest, St. Louis picked him up — moving him to the top line in early November when he easily could’ve moved him down to the American Hockey League — and look at the result.

The fruits of that faith inspired the six-foot-four, 225-pound winger to take massive strides in his development, and he showed it by scoring his 20th goal and notching his 30th assist to reach 50 points for the season on Tuesday.

Nick Suzuki blossomed into a near point-per-game player — he finished with 77 over 82 and was entrusted by St. Louis to play mammoth minutes against the league’s best players night-in, night-out. Cole Caufield was convinced by the coach to sacrifice some goals to round out his game and ended up doing it and still finishing with 28 goals and 65 points. And they were just two examples of the universal buy-in St. Louis achieved from core players and role players alike.

“He’s just great,” said Slafkovsky. “Off the ice, his ideas, it’s just something else. You don’t get a coach like that often, and he’s the smartest guy of all of us. It’s just great. When he says something, you look at things in a different way, and I feel like with what we’re trying to build, a lot of that is his ideas and if we just connect everything together, we’ll be good.”

They all believe it.

“I think they like the way we want to play,” said St. Louis. “And they don’t have to like the way we want to play but, again, we have to convince them. And I feel like we’ve done a really good job as a staff to teach, to explain, and to involve them in the discussion. I think they feel like they’re part of the process, it’s not a dictatorship, and I think when you have that environment you get an easier buy-in.”

Lane Hutson and Logan Mailloux, who both made their NHL debuts with the Canadiens this week, could feel it all around them.

It made for a seamless transition to the league, with Hutson registering points in both his games and Mailloux immediately getting his first assist Tuesday while playing over 21 minutes on the team’s top pair with Mike Matheson.

They are players that represent hope for the future, just as the entire team inspired some with how it competed from Game 1 through 82.

There were few down efforts along the way for the Canadiens, which is reflected in them playing in a league-leading 44 games decided by a single goal.

It was St. Louis who pushed them there, and there’s hope he’ll push them to a whole other level.

“I’m proud of where we are as a group both on the ice and off the ice, and every year you’ve gotta keep convincing,” he said. “We’re selling this product but there’s a lot of nice products in the league. And next year, maybe we have to change our product a little bit. It’s like, why do you have an iPhone 14 or 15 and why don’t you have an iPhone 8 still? Because there’s something better. The software improves.

“For me, it’s constantly trying to improve the software, so to speak, and trying to sell that — why we’re adding this and that.”

Management will have to take care of the rest, to add some premium talent to a group that desperately needs more up front.

But the job St. Louis did this season helped provide the incentive, and gave hope to fans that the Canadiens are heading in the right direction.

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