Year-End Coaching Review: 2024-2025

After reviewing both player and management performance in 2024/2025 earlier this summer, it’s now time to evaluate the performance of the coaching staff.

Martin St. Louis – Head Coach
Trevor Letowski – Assistant Coach
Stephane Robidas – Assistant Coach
Eric Raymond – Goalie Coach

While the coaching staff no doubt has separate duties, we are going to evaluate them together as a group, with Martin St. Louis as the head coach ultimately responsible for all areas.

Team Record

As outlined in the management year-end review, Montreal’s overall team performance was much improved with the team improving by 15 points in the standings year over year. Fortunately, the Habs were in the weaker Eastern Conference and ended up squeaking into the playoffs. Had they been in the West, they would not have been in the mix for a playoff spot.

From a coaching perspective, the biggest concern has to be the horrible start to the season with a record of 8-13-3 on December 2nd, ranking them 31st overall (second-last) in the NHL. The team obviously came back strong and put together an impressive second half, but the coaching staff must have the team better prepared to play a full 82-game season.

Team offence was slightly improved (up nine goals) but the team’s defence made some big improvements with 24 fewer goals against. The Canadiens still had a big negative goal differential (-20) so they are clearly not going to compete against the best teams, but it was a big improvement overall from the previous season.

Special Teams

Perhaps the biggest accomplishment of the coaching staff is the adjustments made to their special teams play. The penalty kill was ranked 24th (76.5%) in 2023/2024 and made massive improvements to come in at 9th overall (80.9%). As the third most penalized team in the league with 322 penalties, just that improvement alone potentially reduced the goals against by around 14 goals.

While it may seem small considering the Habs were involved in 32 games decided by one goal, the impact of improved penalty killing is quite meaningful. Jake Evans, Joel Armia, Christian Dvorak, and Josh Anderson logged the most ice time shorthanded amongst forwards. With two of those departing for other teams, the coaching staff will need to identify other forwards to contribute in 2025-26.

Another big accomplishment of the coaching staff was the reduction in penalty killing time for Nick Suzuki. In 2023/2024, Suzuki logged almost one minute per game shorthanded while in 2024/2025, this was reduced to 0:37 per game. Focusing Suzuki’s efforts and talent to the power play and even strength situations was part of the reason Suzuki put up the best numbers of his career. On an offensively starved team like Montreal, you just can’t have your top centre killing penalties. The coaching staff made this adjustment in 2024/2025 and will need to reduce it even further in 2025/2026.

The power play also improved, ranking 21st overall (20.1%), up from 27th overall (17.5%) in 2023/2024. While percentage-wise, this is a good improvement, it wasn’t that meaningful since the team drew significantly fewer penalties in 2024/2025, resulting in total power play goals only improving from 44 goals in 2023/2024 to 47 last season.  Despite playing in only 52 games, Patrik Laine was the clear leader for the Habs’ power play as he scored 15 goals (nearly 33%) of the team’s total.

Player Usage

Throughout the season, the coaching staff obviously made a multitude of individual decisions on player deployment. While it’s impossible to evaluate each of those decisions, it is worthwhile to look at some of the larger trends that fans witnessed throughout the season.

For starters, the coaching staff did an excellent job with Lane Hutson. In the initial few weeks of the season, the coaches deployed Hutson in somewhat sheltered minutes on the second defensive pairing and largely on the second power play unit. As the season progressed and Hutson quickly became more comfortable and established himself, the coaching staff bumped him up to the top power play unit. They also paired him with Mike Matheson and they quickly became the top defensive pairing, playing against the opposition’s top lines. I like the approach that they took and started off Hutson in a reasonable place to gain some experience and success, and when he demonstrated he could handle more, they gave him a bigger role. So much to like about this approach.

Unfortunately, the complete opposite could be said about Kirby Dach. Obviously, Dach struggled throughout the entire season, rarely having a strong game and placing amongst the worst in the NHL for plus/minus. Despite this, the coaches never changed his deployment. Aside from one or two games, Dach always centred the second line with over 15 minutes per game ice time and over three minutes per game on the power play (often on the top unit) until well into the second half of the season.  This from a player who only scored 22 points in his 57-game season (before suffering a season-ending injury), including only nine points in his first 37 games! How the coaching staff didn’t recognize Dach was struggling and adjust his deployment (to either the third or fourth-line centre, or to the wing), I will never understand. While Dach certainly needs to take responsibility for his performance, the coaching staff also needs to be held responsible for their lack of adjustments in the face of obvious struggles.

A similar argument can be made for Alex Newhook. Up until Dach’s injury, Newhook played most of the season on Dach’s line, so it’s hard to distinguish who caused the poor play. But to the eye test, it seemed like Newhook was at least trying and using his speed. Still, Newhook was largely deployed in a second-line winger position, getting over 15 minutes per game, including power play time despite only scoring 26 points all season (82 games). He had nine goals and zero assists in his first 34 games! How this type of performance doesn’t require a lineup change is so far beyond my understanding it’s laughable. But it never happened until Dach’s injury and that’s when Newhook became the second-line centre. No wonder Patrik Laine showed no effort when he was forced to play with these two!

On the opposite side of things, fans can always appreciate Brendan Gallagher. His effort is endless and he is a possession monster with a Corsi rating of 51%, despite mostly playing with Dvorak and Anderson, who both had a 41% Corsi rating. Gallagher ended up being fourth in team scoring (third in goals) despite being buried on the third line with limited power play opportunities and less than 14 minutes a night playing time. I’ve written about this before that when paired with Monahan or Evans over the last few seasons, Gallagher was on pace for better than 25 goals. It couldn’t be more obvious that there is no chemistry with Dvorak and it’s this line combination that has held Gallagher back over the last few seasons. Despite playing strong responsible hockey, scoring 21 goals and leading his line (once again!), and despite a horrible second line above him, the coaching staff refused to promote Gallagher to the second line or really make any adjustments to either line. It’s bewildering how these two lines were not mixed up to try different combinations to find some success. I wonder how Laine would feel about playing with Gallagher – a guy who will dig endlessly in the corners and force some turnovers out to the slot?

The coaching staff does deserve credit when it comes to Josh Anderson. They seem to have realized that Anderson’s style is more North-South and straight lines, whereas in previous seasons, St. Louis was constantly trying to get him to make moves East-West. This didn’t seem to happen last season and Anderson had a nice bounce back, scoring 15 goals and 27 points. They also started using his speed on the penalty kill with good success, as noted earlier in this article.

In the playoffs, it became obvious the team was undersized when playing against Washington. After being a healthy scratch for many of the games towards the end of the season (for unknown reasons), the coaching staff finally put Arber Xhekaj into the lineup. The results were instantaneous. After patrolling the centre line during the warmup and establishing himself with a couple of big hits early in the game, the entire team played like they were two feet taller and 100 lbs heavier and were clearly the better team in that game. They obviously felt more comfortable with Savard in the lineup, despite playing very sheltered minutes, but Xhekaj is deserving of a spot in this lineup. He is as special a player as Hutson. A solid third-pairing defenceman who can move well and play good hockey, while being one of the strongest players in the league, bringing fear to the other team. Those qualities are extremely rare and hopefully after the playoff games, the coaching staff has started to realize the value that Xhekaj brings to the lineup.

In summary, it’s hard to argue with the success and improvement the team showed, and the coaching staff played a large part in this success. Having said that, I believe they still left a lot of success on the table by refusing or being too stubborn to make changes to the lineup when players were obviously struggling for extended periods of time. As fans, we can only hope that the coaching staff gets a chance to reflect on their performance and can learn and grow – just as the players do.