Whenever Claude Julien tweaks his forward lines within a game and gets asked about it afterward, his go-to response is that “It’s called coaching.”
But for the majority of this season, Julien hasn’t had to do too much of that very specific brand of coaching, because his forward lines, for the most part, have remained remarkably consistent. But there was a situation brewing, one that came to a head in St. Louis last week and one Julien finally had to solve.
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His key offensive tandem of Jonathan Drouin and Max Domi was no longer producing and his patience was beginning to wear thin.
“You know, I think Jonathan’s had a good season, the last little while has been tough for him,” Julien said last Wednesday after practice in St. Louis. “I see the same thing everybody else does. Our work is to try to get him going. Part of it is, we know he’s got the talent. His compete level and how much he wants to get involved and all that stuff is what really makes a big difference in his game. Trust me, we work hard with all players, individuals and groups and I think a good portion of it has to come from the player. At the same time, that duo has done well, they’re leading our team in scoring. But lately, they haven’t been doing it. So I have to consider down the road if it doesn’t get better to separate them.”
The next night against the Blues it did not get better. On Saturday against the Colorado Avalanche, Julien separated them, just as he said he would. But in saying so, Julien also expressed concern about the ripple effect such a move would have on his other lines, and we saw that problem manifest itself over the next two games, something Julien solved over the course of the Canadiens’ 5-1 win at home against the Florida Panthers on Tuesday. But more on that later.
The most important change Julien made Saturday was putting Drouin with Phillip Danault and Brendan Gallagher, which is the penthouse suite of the Canadiens forward group. As our Olivier Bouchard suggested on Monday, playing Drouin with the Canadiens two strongest possession players was putting Julien’s most gifted forward in a position to shine.
One of the biggest ways this benefits Drouin is that he doesn’t need to carry the water when it comes to offensive zone entries because Danault and Gallagher are more than capable of handling that themselves, as we can see here from the game Saturday against Colorado.
Even when Drouin has the puck in the neutral zone, he’s more than happy to just hand it off and let his new linemates take care of the entry. In these cases, it was Danault.
If it’s a dump and chase situation the same principle applies; playing with Danault and Gallagher gives Drouin a far greater chance of having the puck in the offensive zone, as we see here against Boston.
Having two guys with him who can take care of zone entries, puck recoveries and board play essentially on their own gives Drouin the liberty – to use a phrase Max Pacioretty loved – to get lost in the offensive zone and find soft areas in the defensive coverage for his linemates to find him once they’ve secured possession of the puck. In this case, Danault nearly sets up Drouin for a golden opportunity after Drouin decides to leave the puck for Danault below the goal line rather than pick it up himself.
But there is another aspect to choosing who plays with Drouin and it appears to be an important one. Last season, Drouin played his best hockey when playing on a line with Gallagher and Paul Byron. This season, whenever Julien was asked about how well Domi was playing earlier in the season, he always made it a point to also mention how well Drouin was playing, suggesting there was a link there.
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“(Domi)’s playing with tons of energy, tons of confidence and the guy on his left side is doing the same thing,” Julien said on Oct. 23 after Domi and Drouin each had two points in a 3-2 win against the Calgary Flames. “From the start of camp we had them together, we split them to start the season and put them back together. They’re showing us right now that they belong together.”
When asked in St. Louis last week if Drouin was the type of player who needs someone on his line to push him, as it seemed towards the end of last season when he played with Byron and Gallagher, Julien dismissed it.
“I don’t think, personally, that has anything to do with it,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, whether he played his best hockey, that’s when he played his best, at the end of the year. We need a player to play as good as he can all year round, so we don’t just pick spots. As far as I’m concerned, he was one of those guys that, just at that point, I thought he competed well. So he’s got to find his compete level and bring it up to match his skill level and if he does that he’s going to be a much better player.”
Fine, he may be right. Maybe the simple fact that the lines were changed can explain why Drouin’s compete level has suddenly jumped significantly. Maybe the lines were, in fact, stale and needed a reboot. But it’s not a stretch to believe all that can be true while Drouin needing to be inspired by the compete level of his linemates is also true.
I mean, how are you not inspired when Gallagher’s first shift of the game in Boston looks like this, taking a stick in the face, going after Zdeno Chara in the corner and bouncing off someone else as he exits the zone? If you want to understand how important that game was to the Canadiens, just watch this shift.
On the first shift of the second period, Drouin did this:
Coincidence? Maybe. But maybe not.
But remember that ripple effect Julien was concerned about in St. Louis? It was real.
Max Domi moved to the middle of a line with Joel Armia and Artturi Lehkonen while Tomas Tatar came off the Danault line and played to the left of Jesperi Kotkaniemi with Paul Byron on the right side. The only line that stayed intact was the only line that showed up to play in St. Louis, the fourth line of Michael Chaput, Nicolas Deslauriers and Kenny Agostino.
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Domi had played with both Armia and Lehkonen when each of them was given an audition on the right side of his line with Drouin earlier in the season. Kotkaniemi had barely played with Tatar, somewhere around 63 minutes at 5-on-5, much of which came after power plays had expired. Those two lines did not exactly click, though Domi was still doing some good things and appeared to benefit from the strong board play of Armia and Lehkonen. Still, with Domi’s propensity to think pass first, he wasn’t playing with two of the team’s best finishers.
With the ripple effect still manifesting itself midway through the game against the Panthers, Julien sent Domi on the ice in Kotkaniemi’s spot between Tatar and Byron at 16:18 of the second period, with Kotkaniemi taking the spot on the all Finnish line we had seen previously this season. It took only 35 seconds for this to happen.
“At this time of year you can go out there with a new set of wingers or a new centreman every shift,” Domi said, downplaying the instant impact of the line change. “We have chemistry off the ice, which translates directly on the ice. We practice with each other and against each other so much we know each other’s habits. What are we, in January right now? So obviously you build chemistry with guys, but you build chemistry as a team, too.”
When Julien was asked following the game what he saw that led him to make the change, he paused for a few seconds. He wanted to resist the temptation until he was told that we know. It’s called coaching.
“I don’t want to use that line, but it is coaching,” Julien said. “You look at different things and you just make those changes. I can easily go back to the other situation. I think the good thing about this year is I’m able to put players with different people and because we have the same goal and everyone wants to play the same way, more or less, we’re getting the results. So that’s an important thing. Down the road we may need to make some moves because of injuries or whatever. If everybody is playing with everybody and you see that it’s worked, you have at least a little bit of knowledge on your lineup.”
Julien has had to deal with injuries this season to Armia and currently to Andrew Shaw, but there have been certain constants in his lineup. Domi-Drouin was one of them, a duo formed in the fourth game of the season. Tatar-Danault-Gallagher was another, a line formed on the first day of training camp. Now, Julien is likely going to lose Byron to a suspension and he’ll have to adjust again.
But Julien’s first major line shuffle of the season produced the desired result: a three-game winning streak, greater offensive balance and, most importantly, a more engaged and competitive Jonathan Drouin.
(Photo: Francois Lacasse/NHLI via Getty Images)
