Stu Cowan: Jeff Petry’s comments should carry weight with Canadiens

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Things are starting to unravel for Canadians.

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Defender Jeff Petry expressed frustration after Tuesday’s 5-2 loss to the Penguins in Pittsburgh extended the Canadiens’ winless streak to seven games (0-6-1).

“It’s frustrating. It’s the same things, over and over,” said Petry. “We don’t play as a team, we don’t play as a group. It’s like you’re looking to find where the people are. It seems like there’s no structure out there.”

Petry had missed the previous four games with an upper body injury, and he also didn’t like what he saw during those games.

“You look at it from above and there are times when you’re scratching your head,” said Petry. “I feel like everyone knows where we should be, but we will not go to those places. We don’t make it easy for anyone on the ice, except for the other team most of the time ”.

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Petry’s comments were a direct shot into head coach Dominique Ducharme’s system and it’s not the first time this season that Petry has spoken that way.

Last month, when I asked Petry if the numerous failures in the defensive zone were due to the players being confused or trying to do too much, he said: “I think it’s a combination of both. They all want to do the right thing and they want to help kill the game and turn it around. I think we are overthinking instead of just reacting. I think it’s making us react slowly. When you are thinking and you are a little indecisive is when things are not so easy. When you have confidence in yourself and your teammates, and you’re playing on tiptoe knowing that I’m going to go and even if they beat me, there will be layers, there will be that support and I feel like that’s something. that we are missing right now. “

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Petry, with 0-2-2 totals and a minus-5 differential in 26 games, is among the many Canadians underperforming this season. But he’s also a 34-year veteran in his eighth season with the team and he’s a backup captain. He is very intelligent and soft-spoken. Petry knew exactly what he was saying after Tuesday’s game and you have to think that he was speaking for other players in the room. He’s been on bad teams before during his first five NHL seasons in Edmonton when the Oilers never made the playoffs.

The Canadiens are 6-21-3, have yet to win two games in a row and have scored two or fewer goals in 22 of their 30 games. The only other time the Canadiens had six or fewer wins in the first 30 games of a season was in 1938-39, when they were 6-18-6.

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Ducharme’s regular season overall record as head coach is 21-37-10.

Ben Chiarot, another veteran defender, was asked for his opinion on Petry’s comments after Wednesday’s practice at Brossard.

“I don’t know what Jeff said yesterday,” Chiarot said. “After one game, the boys’ emotions rise and the boys are frustrated right now when they lose seven games in a row. I don’t know what was said, but we have a system that Dom and the coaches have put in place and we follow it and try to follow it every night. “

Is it possible that players are no longer buying what Ducharme sells after the locker room lost many key veterans after last season’s trip to the Stanley Cup final?

“I don’t think the purchase is any different,” Chiarot said. “We are missing some important players. Since camp, we have been and more now. So you have new guys in the league, new guys on our team and it can be a lot. There are many changes at the moment, it is not the same team. But I don’t think acceptance is any different. “

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Jeff Gorton, the Canadiens’ new executive vice president of hockey operations, has already said that Ducharme’s job is safe for the rest of this season. You have to think that team owner / president Geoff Molson had a lot to say about it because he still plays Claude Julien for $ 5 million not to coach this season and is paying Ducharme $ 1.7 million in the first season of his three years, a $ 5.1 million deal.

But there are still 52 games left and if the players don’t buy what the coach sells, it’s a big problem that needs to be solved. Promoting assistant coach Luke Richardson to interim head coach would seem like a good solution, but that would create another linguistic controversy that Molson probably wants to avoid.

Do you remember Randy Cunneyworth?

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Ducharme said he spoke to the team before practice Wednesday about Petry’s comments and insisted “we are all on the same page.”

“Anytime, anyway, that we need to talk about things, we do it as a family,” Ducharme said. “We take care of that and that’s it.

“Everyone wants to do well,” added the coach. “We take care of business this morning.”

The Canadiens must start taking care of business on ice.

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