Don't find fault after Montreal Canadiens finished its opening night tour in Toronto, Detroit and Chicago with two major wins, but Martin St. Louis may want to make some changes to his power play.
The coach’s desire to give both of his players more time to establish interaction is understandable.
But St. Louis, which overestimated the urgency during the 22-day training camp (and first to start this season), probably shouldn't wait any longer than it already has. Especially after the Canadiens missed eight of 10 opportunities to bury the Blackhawks at five-on-four before Kaiden Guhle scored one on Chicago goaltender Spencer Knight on a five-on-five goal to make it 3-2 with 15.7 seconds left in the game.
That doesn't mean Montreal's power play needs a complete overhaul.
As Nick Suzuki noted to reporters in Chicago after Saturday's game, power play goals from Zachary Bolduc and Caufield all but secured the Canadiens a point against the Blackhawks.
But all other attempts to be empty could just as easily cost them two.
It almost succeeded as the game ended 2-2 with the Blackhawks making their best push in the final 18 minutes to turn the game around without a penalty.
“We didn’t convert,” St. Louis said of the Canadiens’ power play.
It was a continuation of what we saw in Wednesday and Thursday's games against the Maple Leafs and Red Wings. These matches are one to five.
And now Montreal's power play is three of 15 on the season.
“I think we had to work a lot on our power game and learn a lot about it,” Suzuki said.
Most of what We Watching this, I realized that the mixture is not yet fully optimized, and the sample size is not too small to draw such a conclusion.
The Canadiens have had the most power play opportunities in the NHL thus far, and St. Louis can't ignore how their scoring seemed to diminish with every pass.
The good news is that he can change that.
St. Louis said one of the things he's most excited about is that he'll have more options this season than at any other time in his four-and-a-half-year tenure. Well, he shouldn't waste any time practicing on Tuesday when the Canadiens open the Bell Center for the season against the Seattle Kraken.
It could be as simple as moving Noah Dobson to his top unit and reuniting Lane Hutson with Patrik Laine in the second.
One of the reasons St. Louis would go with this option is that it would give the top unit the opportunity to make a right-handed one-timer from the blue line.
Second, the right-handed Suzuki will stick to the left corner of the offensive zone, where he can continue to set up the game for the left-handed Bolduc in the bumper. This is one element of the power play that is working well right now.
Moving Lane to the left side of the top block will cancel this. But moving Hutson to the second option will preserve that opportunity and reunite Hutson with Lane, whom he helped score 15 power-play goals last season.
It would also put Hutson and Lane together with Ivan Demidov, and those three together could do some serious damage.
Perhaps St. Louis will choose to move Demidov to the first unit and Juraj Slafkovski to the second unit. Or perhaps the coach would prefer different personnel changes or no personnel changes at all.
But if he decides to make no money at all, we don't see how he could avoid changing some aspects of the strategy.
The power play results are not good enough yet and the process doesn't look much better. So the Canadiens only had 12 shots on net in their 10 power plays on Saturday.
Just nine of their 25 shots with the man advantage came from the high-danger zone, making their performance against the Blackhawks far from dangerous.
This is something that St. Louis shouldn't like. This is something he needs to fix immediately.
It only helps that the coach has nothing else to focus on right now.
With no road games in the Canadiens' favor and the difficult task of playing their first three home games in four nights to start the season, they more than held their own in five-on-five play. They also converted eight of ten penalties and scored short-handed. And both of their goalies are in the win column.
St. Louis should be happy about all this. He should also be pleased with the way the Canadiens stuck together despite the physical issues, with everyone from Kaiden Guhle to Demidov taking the lead in Saturday's game.
There were a lot of good things about the way Montreal started the season.
But if you're going to find fault…
