It wasn’t so long ago that Martin St-Louis’ nomination as the Montreal Canadiens’ coach raised more than a few eyebrows. On that cold day of February 2022, GM Kent Hughes and Jeff Gorton announced that a man who had only coached minor hockey until then would be taking the helm of one of the NHL’s most prestigious franchises in a market that lives and breathes hockey.
Many believed that the lack of experience meant that the Hall of Famer would be a temporary solution, a patch to put on a lost season and evaluate what the Habs actually had in their locker room, but over four years on, he’s still there.
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The bench boss has shown himself to be much more than a temporary fix. What we didn’t know back then was that St-Louis had been training to be a coach even when he was a player, taking to the whiteboard and explaining to his teammates what they should be doing. In La Presse on Friday, Mathias Brunet’s interview with Steve Begin revealed that he was even doing it when he was playing in the Calgary Flames’ AHL system, long before he became one of the top players in the game.
St-Louis has now been behind the Canadiens’ bench for 365 regular-season games, and he has a 162-155-47 record for a .511 points percentage, that’s very impressive when considering the state the team was in when he first took over. He now also has 24 games of playoffs experience in his back pocket with a 10-14 record that includes to seven-game series win over some of the best coaches in the league in Jon Cooper and Lindy Ruff.
Beyond the numbers, though, what’s more impressive about what St-Louis has accomplished is how much he’s helped players individually. He’s a brilliant communicator and teacher as well; that’s not always true for former players who were brilliant at playing the game but fall well short as a coach- think of Wayne Gretzky with the Arizona Coyotes, for instance.
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In the Canadiens’ first-round series against the Tampa Bay Lightning, St-Louis showed that he could adapt to another team’s style of play. After holding firm on matchups in the hope that his top line would find a way to get the better of the opposition, he realized that it wasn’t likely to happen, and he started juggling lines like the best of them. Getting the better of Cooper is no easy task, but he still did it.
Of course, St-Louis isn’t perfect; nobody is. His shortcomings and lack of experience were exposed against Rod Brind’Amour and the Carolina Hurricanes in the third round, where the Habs were beaten in just five games and outplayed at nearly every turn. Still, just like his players, the coach will have learned from the experience.
As things stand, he is the fifth-longest-tenured coach in the league behind Cooper, Jared Bednar, Brind’Amour, and Andre Tourigny. His contract with the Canadiens is set to expire at the end of the season, and while Hughes did say that’s something that was on his to-do list this off-season, there’s been no news on that front.
What did happen though was that the Canadiens appointed Derek Lalonde as an associate coach, because Trevor Letowski reportedly wants to take a step back and have more time to spend with his family. He was St-Louis’ right hand man and there’s no doubt that seeing him come out of the bench won’t have please him. Still, it would be surprising if St-Louis started the season without a new deal in his back pocket, he has proven over the years that he’s what the Habs needed.
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