When the Canadiens named Martin St-Louis interim head coach on February 9, 2022, they handed a struggling team to a Hall of Famer with no NHL coaching experience. He took over from Dominique Ducharme with the club sitting at 8-30-7 and bottom of the Atlantic Division. As a player, St-Louis had 1,033 points, a Hart Trophy, two Art Ross Trophies, a Stanley Cup in 2004 and a Hall of Fame induction in 2018. As a coach, his résumé was youth hockey. The interim tag came off on June 1, 2022, and the Canadiens have not looked back.

Now he is about to start his fifth season behind the bench, and for the first time the job is changing in a way that has nothing to do with rebuilding. Martin St-Louis has to adapt to a new reality.

Four Seasons Behind the Bench

Counting the partial 2021-22 season as year one, 2026-27 is St-Louis’s fifth year in charge. Through four seasons he has coached 365 regular-season games and put together a record of 163-155-47. The more important number is the direction: 68 points in 2022-23, 76 in 2023-24, 91 in 2024-25 and 106 last season. For every Canadiens season since 1917-18, see our Season by Season page.

Season	GP	W	L	OTL	PTS	Result
2021-22 (from Feb. 9)	37	14	19	4	32	Missed playoffs
2022-23	82	31	45	6	68	Missed playoffs
2023-24	82	30	36	16	76	Missed playoffs
2024-25	82	40	31	11	91	Lost in round one (1-4 vs. Washington)
2025-26	82	48	24	10	106	Lost in conference final (1-4 vs. Carolina)

Over the last two seasons the Canadiens went 88-55-21 for 197 points in 164 games, made the playoffs both times, and last spring beat Tampa Bay and Buffalo in seven games each before running into Carolina, the eventual Stanley Cup champion, in the Eastern Conference final.

The Rebuild Is Over

That is the headline of this season. The Canadiens are no longer a rebuilding team that is developing young players and hoping for progress. They are a playoff team with a core that has grown up under St-Louis, and the player numbers show it.

Player	2022-23	2023-24	2024-25	2025-26
Nick Suzuki	66	77	89	101
Cole Caufield	36 (46 GP)	65	70	88
Juraj Slafkovský	10 (39 GP)	50	51	73
Lane Hutson	—	—	66	78

Suzuki went from 66 points to 101. Caufield scored 51 goals last season. Slafkovský, the first overall pick in 2022, played only 39 games in his first season, then put up 50 and 51 points in his next two seasons before jumping to 73 last year, a 22-point increase that makes him a true top-line scorer. Hutson followed a Calder Trophy season with 78 points. Players getting better and a team getting better under the same coach is not a coincidence, and it is the reason expectations in Montreal have moved. You can follow how each of them is doing every week in our Canadiens Stats of the Week.

More Pressure This Season

For the first time since St-Louis arrived, the Canadiens are at the beginning of a window of opportunity. The expectations are different and they are higher. In September the club gave St-Louis a multi-year contract extension, a clear sign of how the organization sees the coach and where it thinks this group is going.

That raises a question that is harder than it sounds: how do you evaluate pressure? Is missing the playoffs a failure for a team that won 48 games and reached the conference final? Is losing in round one a failure? What about round two? When a team was rebuilding, progress was the measuring stick. When a team is trying to win, results are, and everybody will have a different line for what counts as a good season.

St-Louis Has a New Problem: Too Many Good Players

This is the adaptation that may matter the most. For the first time since the rebuild began, the Canadiens have real depth, and prospects are knocking at the door. By my count, on a healthy night St-Louis has two extra forwards and one extra defenseman, three good NHL players who cannot dress.

Injuries are a major key to how that plays out. Right now Oliver Kapanen and Kaiden Guhle are not in the projected lineup for tonight’s home opener against Carolina, and Ivan Demidov is listed as uncertain, so the decisions are a little easier. They will not stay easy. When Kapanen and Guhle are back, St-Louis will have to leave three players out of the lineup every game, and he knows it. Florian Xhekaj and Adam Engström are healthy and waiting.

St-Louis said himself, as Arpon Basu reported in The Athletic, that this is a situation he has not dealt with much and that it is “a good problem to have,” but that managing it well is now a big part of his job. He talked about a rotation that keeps players moving in and out. Any rotation has to be fair and cannot be driven by the last game alone. It also changes the dynamic inside the room, because every shift now carries urgency when there are capable players watching from the press box. His message to the group was to make it hard for the coach to take you out by doing what the game asks at that moment.

You could see what he wants on opening night in Toronto. In a 3-2 win, no forward played more than Suzuki’s 18:43, and the twelfth forward, Zack Bolduc, still got 11:04. That is a tight spread. It keeps the top players fresh and gives everybody a real role. Then Pittsburgh happened. Chasing a 5-1 deficit, Caufield played 22:50 and Suzuki 22:43, while Alexandre Texier got 9:14. When a game gets away from you, the balanced bench is the first thing to go, and that is why the second-period mistakes in Pittsburgh bothered the players so much.

Focus on the Details

If there is one theme St-Louis keeps coming back to this fall, it is details. Carolina is the model. The Hurricanes took the Canadiens apart in five games and went on to win the Cup, and everyone in the Montreal dressing room speaks about them with respect, not revenge. Alexandre Carrier said it is not really a revenge game, and Suzuki said the Hurricanes earned that series.

St-Louis said he could talk about details for three hours. He pointed to the things that never show up on the scoresheet: individual details with the puck, faceoffs, structure. He described Carolina as a team that is tight over all 200 feet, ready on every faceoff, with everybody playing inside the team identity. Hutson added tight coverage, puck management and winning battles to the list, and said the Canadiens are dangerous when they do those things. The challenge is doing them every night.

That is also the story of the Pittsburgh loss. The mistakes, such as not simplifying in the second period and not playing a deep game to make changes easier for the defense, are ones this team has made for two years and thought it had solved.

Coach’s Take

Year five is where the job gets harder, not easier. In the first years St-Louis had to build a culture and sell the young players on a plan. Now he has to manage the roster, the minutes and the egos of a team that expects to win. Handling three extra players every night is not a problem you can solve with a speech. It takes fairness, communication and consistent standards, and the details he keeps talking about are the standard.

On the details, puck possession is the one that stands out to me. After Pittsburgh, the second period was a problem again, and St-Louis pointed to puck possession as one of the reasons in his press conference. He keeps coming back to it, and last season’s numbers show why.

Look at the share of shot attempts each forward’s line controlled at even strength. Among the 279 forwards who played at least 800 even-strength minutes, Carolina had eight of the top ten, and the top seven were all Hurricanes. Even their depth forwards, Jordan Martinook (ninth) and Jordan Staal (eleventh), were in the top eleven. The only Canadien in the top 50 was Cole Caufield, at 48th. Suzuki was 67th, and the next Canadiens forward after him was 150th.

Rank	Forward	Team	Corsi %
1	Logan Stankoven	CAR	61.6
2	Sebastian Aho	CAR	61.5
3	Jackson Blake	CAR	60.9
4	Andrei Svechnikov	CAR	60.6
5	Nikolaj Ehlers	CAR	60.5
6	Taylor Hall	CAR	60.1
7	Seth Jarvis	CAR	60.1
9	Jordan Martinook	CAR	58.7
48	Cole Caufield	MTL	54.7
67	Nick Suzuki	MTL	53.5

Corsi is not the whole story, but it is the best single measure of who has the puck. This is the gap between the champions and the Canadiens in one table. It is also what Slafkovský described when he said it did not matter who was on the ice for Carolina. If the Canadiens want to be that kind of team, the third and fourth lines have to start controlling the puck, not only the top two. That is why the depth conversation and the details conversation are really the same one.

As for the pressure: I think the floor is the playoffs. After 106 points and a conference final, missing is a step back. I would not call a round-one loss a failure, but it would be a disappointment given what this group did last spring. The real measure is whether the Canadiens look like a team that keeps getting better, with the details cleaned up and depth turned into an advantage, not a headache.

The first test of all that comes tonight. The Canadiens host Carolina in the home opener at 7:00 p.m. ET. For the full week in review, read our Weekly Report.