“You can’t just score goals one way,” Habs head coach says about his team’s struggles. “You got to have more tools, more ways to score.”
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Martin St. Louis learned how to score goals as a player in the NHL.
The Hall of Famer scored 391 goals during his 16 seasons, including a career-high 43 in 2006-07 with the Tampa Bay Lightning. St. Louis also won two Art Ross Trophies as the NHL’s leading scorer, posting 38-56-94 totals in 2003-04 — when he also won the Hart Trophy as league MVP — and in 2012-13 when he had 17-43-60 totals in a lockout-shortened 48-game season.
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Now, as head coach of the Canadiens, one of St. Louis’s biggest challenges has been getting his team to score more goals — especially the forwards.
Heading into Saturday’s game at the Bell Centre against the New York Islanders (7 p.m., SNE, Citytv, TVA Sports, TSN 690 Radio, 98.5 FM), the Canadiens rank 28th in the NHL in offence, scoring an average of 2.62 goals per game. The defencemen have scored 23 goals — led by Mike Matheson and Justin Barron with five each — which ranks second in the NHL, one behind the Colorado Avalanche. But the forwards as a group are struggling to find the back of the net.
Sean Monahan leads the Canadiens with nine goals. Through Thursday’s games, there were 74 forwards in the NHL with more than nine goals. Juraj Slafkovsky (two), Jake Evans (two) and Josh Anderson (one) have played in all 29 games and have five goals combined. Christian Dvorak has gone 17 games without a goal, Brendan Gallagher hasn’t scored in 15 games, Jesse Ylönen hasn’t scored in 12 games, Slafkovsky and Michael Pezzetta haven’t scored in 11 games and Cole Caufield has gone seven games without a goal.
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Caufield, who scored 26 goals in 46 games last season before suffering a shoulder injury that required surgery, has seven goals this season and is on pace to finish the season with 20.
Caufield has always been able to score goals, going back to when he had 18 goals in 19 games in 2014-15 with his Team Illinois under-13 squad. He scored a record 72 goals in 64 games during the 2018-19 season with the USA Hockey National Development Program’s U-18 team and scored 30 goals in 31 games with the University of Wisconsin in 2020-21 to win the Hobey Baker Award as the top player in NCAA hockey.
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While scoring goals has always seemed to come naturally for Caufield, St. Louis doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as a natural-born goal-scorer.
“I think you’re born with the ability to become a goal-scorer and it’s how you work on that,” St. Louis said. “For me, I had abilities to score goals, but when I was young I didn’t have a shot. I was a pass-first guy. So because I couldn’t really shoot it I developed a lot of my playmaking abilities.”
While playing midget triple-A hockey as a 16-year-old for the Laval-Laurentides-Lanaudière Régents, St. Louis had 29-74-103 totals in 42 games. During St. Louis’s most productive of four seasons at the University of Vermont, he posted 29-56-85 totals in 35 games. Because of his size — 5-foot-8 and 176 pounds — St. Louis was never selected at the NHL Draft.
“As I got older, stronger and I worked on my shot, I became a better goal-scorer in the NHL than when I was in college,” he said. “That’s something I worked on and it came with maturation, with getting stronger and bigger — not taller. So for me, you always have to evolve. You can’t just score goals one way. You got to have more tools, more ways to score goals. I think that’s what Cole is finding out.
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“Yeah, he has a great shot, but there’s other parts of the ice that you can shoot from,” St. Louis added. “There’s tips, there’s rebounds, there’s so many things. To me, you got to get on the inside if you want to score. It doesn’t mean you’re going to score from the inside, but you might start there and pop out at the right time. But if you’re always staying there everybody knows you’re there and it’s hard. You’re going to have sticks, shin pads all the time.”
St. Louis used two examples of forwards from his playing days who were able to get inside to score goals. One was Dave Andreychuk, who was his teammate in Tampa when the Lightning won the Stanley Cup in 2004, and the other was Peter Forsberg, who won the Art Ross Trophy after posting 29-77-106 totals with the Colorado Avalanche in 2002-03.
St. Louis noted the 6-foot-4, 220-pound Andreychuk wasn’t a good skater, but he had an ability to arrive inside at the right moment for scoring chances. Andreychuk wasn’t flashy, but he scored 640 career goals, which ranks 15th in NHL history, and he’s in the Hall of Fame. St. Louis said Forsberg, another Hall of Famer, was the best player in the NHL during his prime and he learned a lot by watching him.
“Two different players, but they played inside,” St. Louis said.
That’s what St. Louis is now trying to get his forwards to do more often.
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