MONTREAL – There was Kaiden Guhle, cornered by Calle Jarnkrok and Alexander Kerfoot, pressured into the left quadrant of his own zone with no outlet in sight.
With the puck on his stick, Guhle turned, stepped next to Kerfoot, gripped through the trap with stickhandling, walked around Jarnkrok and fired a tape-to-tape pass across his own blue line and over the red line to Rem Pitlick, who hit the puck. out of danger and into the Toronto zone.
It was a subtle, smart move by the defender that almost made you forget he was playing in his very first NHL game.
Guhle, who will only turn 21 in January, didn’t just look comfortable; he seemed confident. And not just on this piece, but on almost all of them, he took this surprising 4-3 win for the Montreal Canadiens in their opening game against a Toronto Maple Leafs team that has Stanley Cup ambitions this season.
He wasn’t the only kid in a Montreal jersey to take a step forward in his development this evening, although he should be seen as the greatest – a team leader playing 22:16 and the NHL’s deadliest goalscorer in Auston Matthews. to zero for all nine minutes and 33 seconds he faced 5-to-5.
“A pretty calm, cool, confident, relaxed guy, and it shows in his play,” said Jake Allen, who made 29 saves behind Guhle and the rest of the Canadiens defence. “He doesn’t get upset, I don’t think, too much.”
Guhle never seemed upset, even when he made mistakes. And he did making mistakes – flipping the puck four times with passes that missed the target or came off his stick in a way he didn’t intend.
But Guhle recovered well.
So did his young teammates.
Take, for example, Arber Xhekaj. The undrafted 21-year-old also made his debut in Canadiens on Wednesday and that didn’t go quite smoothly.
He conceded two breakouts in a short span of the second period – one of which forced him to capture Kerfoot and offer him a penalty. Allen inevitably stopped – and was caught swinging out of position on the goal Denis Malgin scored to put the Leafs ahead 2-1 near the halfway mark.
But Xhekaj didn’t let that affect him.
“For me, when I play, I block everything around me and play the same game I’ve been playing all my life,” he said afterwards. “I just stick to my game, shake it off and play. It’s my first game and there will be nerves, but you just keep going. If you look back on your mistakes during a game like that and keep them in mind, you get nowhere.”
Xhekaj shook off those playoffs, got some good scoring opportunities, contributed to a penalty kill that left Toronto scoreless by four, and he came out feeling after Josh Anderson sealed the win for Montreal with 17 seconds left. feel happy to come by with a better understanding of how it goes at this level.
Juraj Slafkovsky experienced it the same way.
The first overall pick in the 2022 NHL draw was a ball of nerves to start. When he was introduced to the audience at the Bell Center, he was so impressed with the ovation he received that he forgot to stop at the center ice as directed and skated right to his spot next to Anderson.
Minutes later, on one of his first shifts of the game, Slafkovsky didn’t look up and crashed straight into Guhle as the defender attempted to skate the puck out of the Montreal zone.
“That probably helped me,” he said. “Then I woke up.”
Slafkovsky settled in, pulled his team a power play, had some nice rushes, took a shot at the net and was greeted in the locker room after the win by the only other Slovak in Canadian history to wear his number 20 .
“I told him to enjoy the city,” said Richard Zednik, who played five seasons in Montreal from 2001 to 2006. “I told him it’s a great hockey city to play in and the fans will love you and just keep skating and don’t think too much about the ice. Just skate and play your game.”
Jordan Harris, the 22-year-old who played 10 games with the Canadiens last season, seemed to do just that throughout this entire season.
The defender registered his first NHL assist on Sean Monahan’s first goal as a Canadien, making it 3-2 Montreal with 2:30 to go in the third period, and he played mostly clear through his 25 teams.
But Harris wasn’t perfect. Three minutes before Monahan scored, he gave Malgin a high stick, which could have cost a lot of money.
“He played great, though,” said Xhekaj.
All the kids of the Canadiens did well, from Harris to Slafkovsky, and from Nick Suzuki to Cole Caufield.
23-year-old Suzuki, in his first game as Canadiens captain, saw 21-year-old Caufield score Montreal’s first goal after 33 seconds of the second period, and Caufield added another just under 15 minutes later. .
All in all quite positive.
“We’ll see what happens when normalcy kicks in and emotions fall away,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis. “I’m curious what they’ll look like when that happens.
“But honestly, it’s fantastic what we’re seeing from the kids.”
None of them showed better than Guhle, but they all took steps forward in this victory.