Martin St-Louis has a phrase for how he wants this team thinking, and he used it more than once Monday at the Canadiens’ golf tournament in Laval-sur-le-Lac: “Win Your Day.” Process over outcome. Stack the days, let the season sort itself out. Kent Hughes and Jeff Gorton stayed in that same register all morning — team-building language, careful not to put a number on anything, a deliberate lowering of temperature after a run to the Eastern Conference Final that nobody in the organization had penciled in this soon.

Nick Suzuki did not stay in that register.

Asked about the season ahead, the captain said Montreal wants home-ice advantage in the first round. Not “keep improving.” Not “take another step.” An actual outcome, stated out loud, by the player the room follows. Everyone else spent the day being careful. Suzuki wasn’t — and if you look at what the Canadiens actually did Monday rather than what they said, his number looks a lot more like the operating plan than management’s caution does.

Start with the extension. St-Louis signed a multi-year deal through 2029-30, his old contract’s final season voided and replaced — effectively a raise a year early, making him the fifth-longest-tenured coach in the NHL. “He hasn’t given us any reason to doubt him,” Hughes said. “I believe that Marty and our group will continue to get better.” That’s not a hire you make on a team that’s still figuring out if it belongs where it finished last spring. It’s a hire you make on a team that plans to be there again.

Then there’s Josh Anderson taking the “A” that opened up when Brendan Gallagher was traded — a promotion from inside the room, not an outside answer, joining Suzuki and Mike Matheson in the leadership group. Suzuki spoke about the personal side of losing Gallagher before the leadership question even came up: “I’m going to miss him, but I’m happy for the opportunity he has in Vancouver, close to home,” he said. “I miss my friend, I miss driving with him and talking about anything and everything, but I wish him all the best.”

Chris Kreider is the clearest piece of evidence. St-Louis, who played with Kreider on the Rangers in 2013-14 and 2014-15, didn’t hide how personally he pushed for this signing: “Chris Kreider is a friend of mine. He’s a wonderful person. And he checks a lot of the boxes we needed to improve: grit, presence in front of the net, speed, and experience.” The organization is framing him as a Mark Recchi type — the veteran the 2011 Bruins leaned on to get over the top. He’ll wear #22, Cole Caufield’s old number, since his usual #20 belongs to Juraj Slafkovsky now and Caufield switched to #13 after Johnny Gaudreau’s death. You don’t sign a 35-year-old on a one-year deal and hand him a retired-feeling number unless you think this is the year it matters.

And there’s the hire that got buried under all of it: assistant coach Derek Lalonde, who has real NHL head-coaching experience and a background alongside Jon Cooper in Tampa. Lalonde pushed back directly on how St-Louis’s style gets characterized around the league: “I think the term ‘player-friendly coach’ gets a bad rap because people think it means you let the players run the show, but that’s not the case. Marty’s in charge. He holds his players accountable.” An experienced ex-head coach choosing to defend that approach, not soften it, is its own kind of statement.

Which brings it back to Win Your Day. It’s real, and it’s not nothing — ask Kaiden Guhle, whose knee surgery means the “process” gets tested in October and November whether the room likes it or not. But process and ambition aren’t opposites. St-Louis locked up long-term, Anderson promoted from within, Kreider brought in specifically to finish things off, an experienced voice added next to the coach — that’s not a team lowering the temperature. That’s a team building toward whatever day Suzuki was actually talking about: whichever one clinches home ice in Round 1.

Training camp opens Wednesday. Arber Xhekaj is still unsigned and Guhle’s timeline is the one real complication to all of this — both worth their own follow-up once camp settles the roster. For now, the golf day left one message harder to miss than any of management’s careful language: this team is acting like it belongs on the ice it just left.