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Call of the Wilde: Detroit shades Montreal Canadiens in OT as Habs’ season nears end – Global News

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A home-and-home with the Detroit Red Wings is all that remains for the Montreal Canadiens in the 2023-2024 season. It’s been a season of improvement, and that’s the simple goal in a rebuild.

This one carried extra excitement as it was the debut of college sensation Lane Hutson. The Canadiens and Red Wings played perhaps the most exciting game of the year.

The Wings kept their playoff hopes alive with a 5-4 overtime win.

Wilde Horses 

If a player moves to a higher level and he can’t do his strengths, that is the first indication that he may be in for some difficult days. It isn’t about weaknesses. It’s what brought the player to the NHL — his strengths. Can he still achieve his best traits at higher levels?

The most obvious example is when a goal scorer has big totals in a junior hockey league, but can’t score at all at the NHL level. Another example would be a playmaker at the college level who has plenty of time to make plays, but at the NHL level, he can’t hold on to the puck to create success.

This is why the first period of game one in the career of Lane Hutson showed right away that he was going to have absolutely no difficulty with his strengths. On the first shift, he had very little time to make a pass to Juraj Slafkovsky and did it perfectly.

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On the second shift, he scored his first NHL point already. It was classic Hutson. He danced along the blue line. He was pursued by a checker whom he left in his wake. He then made a feint to beat two more before shooting it on goal. Brendan Gallagher scored on the rebound.

Two shifts later, it was Hutson with a beautiful pass after getting the puck off a draw in the offensive zone. He waited and waited until the shooter found his open lane. It was, once again, gorgeous. Hutson has shown so quickly that he can do exactly what he has always done as a player, offensively.

Defensively, Hutson made an error leading to the Red Wings first goal. There is no disputing that it’s important that Hutson plays good defence as well, but defence is about decisions, and decisions get better with experience. Decisions can be improved far easier than talent can be found.

On that first goal against, Hutson tracked forwards up high, and as a result, he got caught. He couldn’t track back down-low to the goal fast enough, so he ended up watching the puck, instead of taking a man. There will be teaching moments defensively, but as long as he can do offensively what made him one of the best college scoring blue liners in history, he will be an outstanding NHL player.


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As the game progressed, it was clear that Hutson was going to have no trouble finding his passes. Sometimes they were stretch passes that freed players. Sometimes they were simple passes to forwards on the other wall. A player must feel that he has time to make a good pass. It’s a good indicator that there is a calmness in the work. Hutson always looked calm in his first game.

In fact, the most striking note is that Hutson looked exactly like he did as a Boston University Terrier. He moved from college hockey to the NHL and his game did not alter. He was able to achieve the same profile in his first NHL game which is remarkable.

As the game progressed, Hutson got stronger defensively. Around his goal, his head was on a swivel. He was looking for his check, and body-positioning well to block out attackers. He also anticipated the play beautifully on defence to be first on loose pucks.

In overtime, 3-on-3, where Hutson will excel, he wheeled and had a chance right in the slot. It was gorgeous. The win was on his stick. However, with Hutson down low, he wasn’t backed-up and the Red Wings came back the other way to win it.

Head coach Martin St. Louis sure liked Hutson’s first NHL game. Hutson had 22:04 of ice time.

Wilde Goats 

There are no goats. There were only outstanding performances.

Brendan Gallagher scored twice. He now has 15 goals on the season. That may not sound like a Gallagher season, but 15 is a respectable number for a player who gets little to no power play time. Gallagher and his contract are not liabilities. In fact, this was a solid season for Gallagher.

It was also a strong night for Rafael Harvey-Pinard, who scored on a terrific pass from Jake Evans. Evans also had a strong season. He was asked to assume a much larger role with the injury to Christian Dvorak, and he shone. There is an NHL spot for Evans on a stronger Canadiens club. Ultimately, when the team is of a higher quality, he would be a fourth-line centre and a good one.

Josh Anderson didn’t make an impression on the scoresheet, but he had a strong game. Anderson has been looking more comfortable finally. He is driving the net like he used to. He may be finding the courage he needs in his game again after his serious high-ankle sprain injury. It says here that Anderson recovers next year to have a strong season putting this year’s woes behind him.

The club is looking quite competitive in game 81. The pieces are coming together.

Wilde Cards

The Canadiens’ first 100-goal line in 31 years may already be assembled. The century mark in goals is difficult to attain. Generally, there are only five to 10 100-goal lines per season. This year, there are seven.

In Montreal, fans haven’t been able to count on one this century. Even in the high scoring days of Alex Kovalev, the last player to be a point-per-game in Montreal in 2008, no line has been even close to 100 goals.

The last line to achieve the 100-goal mark was Brian Bellows, Vincent Damphousse and Kirk Muller in 1993. That says a lot about how good that cup-winning team was, and even more about how much of a scoring black hole fans have lived through in Montreal for a long, long time.

It may finally be ending. A 100-goal line could actually be a reality as soon as next season. The sample size of Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky is getting solid enough to start dreaming. The arrival of Slafkovsky has changed everything.

In the last 41 games for the Canadiens, Slafkovsky has exploded with 15 goals after attaining only four goals in the first half of the season. Nick Suzuki has also had a tremendous second half as the top goal-getter on the line with 22 goals. Suzuki is playing the best hockey of his career. The laggard by only a small margin, even though he is considered the best sniper of the three, is Cole Caufield. He has 14 goals in the second half of the season.

Add that up and the Canadiens line has 51 goals in 41 games. There is your 100-goal line. Can they duplicate that for an entire season? It promises to be exciting to find out. In their favour is that all three players are still improving, especially Slafkkovsky, whose ceiling seems very high. Also in their favour is that they have a chance to get a little relief in match-ups in the coming years, if the second line can also provide some offence and be a threat.

This is the type of scoring talent not seen in Montreal since 1993. That seems bizarre to say, but the numbers tell the true story. The best scoring teams under head coach Guy Carbonneau did not have a line that scored at the pace of Caufield-Suzuki-Slafkovsky.

Next season should be exciting.

Brian Wilde, a Montreal-based sports writer, brings you Call of the Wilde on globalnews.ca after each Canadiens game.

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Soccer legend Christine Sinclair says goodbye in Vancouver |

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Christine Sinclair scored one final goal at B.C. Place, helping the Portland Thorns to a 6-0 victory over the Whitecaps Girls Elite team. The soccer legend has announced she’ll retire from professional soccer at the end of the National Women’s Soccer League season. (Oct. 16, 2024)

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A German in charge of England? Nationality matters less than it used to in international soccer

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The question was inevitable.

At his first news conference as England’s newly appointed head coach, Thomas Tuchel – a German – was asked on Wednesday what message he had for fans who would have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team.

“I’m sorry, I just have a German passport,” he said, laughing, and went on to profess his love for English football and the country itself. “I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country.”

The soccer rivalry between England and Germany runs deep and it’s likely Tuchel’s passport will be used against him if he doesn’t deliver results for a nation that hasn’t lifted a men’s trophy since 1966. But his appointment as England’s third foreign coach shows that, increasingly, even the top countries in the sport are abandoning the long-held belief that the national team must be led by one of their own.

Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA world rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner which has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s soccer federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.

“The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply,” said German soccer researcher and author Christoph Wagner, whose recent book “Crossing the Line?” historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. “It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach, and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to get your methods.”

Not everyone agrees.

English soccer author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was “an admission of failure” for a major soccer nation to have a coach from a different country.

“Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players,” said Wilson, whose books include “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.”

“To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players,” he said, “I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that.”

That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel’s appointment with the provocative headline “A Dark Day for England.”

While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they are still a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in its modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France only Frenchmen since 1975.

And it remains the case that every World Cup-winning team, since the first tournament in 1930, has been coached by a native of that country. The situation is similar for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, though Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.

Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerbäck, 76, coached his native Sweden between 2000-09 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland and Norway.

“I couldn’t say I felt any big difference,” Lagerbäck told The Associated Press. “I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams.”

For Lagerbäck, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country were any language difficulties and having to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African country at the World Cup.

Otherwise, he said, “it depends on the results” — and Lagerbäck is remembered with fondness in Iceland, especially, after leading the country to Euro 2016 for its first ever international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.

Lagerbäck pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in soccer powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.

Portugal for the first time looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried — and ultimately failed — to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian soccer federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian, there’s no prejudice about the nationality.”

The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.

The English Football Association certainly had no qualms making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), simply believing he was the best available coach on the market.

Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least had previous experience of working in English soccer — he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea — and he also speaks better English.

That won’t satisfy all the nay-sayers, though.

“Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager,” Tuchel said.

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AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this story.

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Maple Leafs winger Bobby McMann finding game after opening-night scratch

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TORONTO – Bobby McMann watched from the press box on opening night.

Just over a week later, the Maple Leafs winger took a twirl as the first star.

McMann went from healthy scratch to unlikely offensive focal point in just eight days, putting up two goals in Toronto’s 6-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday.

The odd man out at the Bell Centre against the Montreal Canadiens, he’s slowly earning the trust of first-year head coach Craig Berube.

“There’s a lot of good players on this team,” McMann said of his reaction to sitting out Game 1. “Maybe some guys fit better in certain scenarios than others … just knowing that my opportunity would come.”

The Wainwright, Alta., product skated on the second line with William Nylander and Max Domi against Los Angeles, finishing with those two goals, three hits and a plus-3 rating in just over 14 minutes of work.

“He’s been unbelievable,” said Nylander, who’s tied with McMann for the team lead with three goals. “It’s great when a player like that comes in.”

The 28-year-old burst onto the scene last February when he went from projected scratch to hat-trick hero in a single day after then-captain John Tavares fell ill.

McMann would finish 2023-24 with 15 goals and 24 points in 56 games before a knee injury ruled him out of Toronto’s first-round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins.

“Any time you have success, it helps the confidence,” he said. “But I always trust the abilities and trust that they’re there whether things are going in or (I’m not) getting points. Just trying to play my game and trust that doing the little things right will pay off.”

McMann was among the Leafs’ best players against the Kings — and not just because of what he did on the scoresheet. The forward got into a scuffle with Phillip Danault in the second period before crushing Mikey Anderson with a clean hit in the third.

“He’s a power forward,” Berube said. “That’s how he should think the game, night in and night out, as being a power forward with his skating and his size. He doesn’t have to complicate the game.”

Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz knew nothing about McMann before joining Toronto in free agency over the summer.

“Great two-way player,” said the netminder. “Extremely physical and moves really well, has a good shot. He’s a key player for us in our depth. I was really happy for him to get those two goals.

“Works his butt off.”

ON TARGET

Leafs captain Auston Matthews, who scored 69 times last season, ripped his first goal of 2024-25 after going without a point through the first three games.

“It’s not going to go in every night,” said Matthews, who added two assists against the Kings. “It’s good to see one fall … a little bit of the weight lifted off your shoulders.”

WAKE-UP CALL

Berube was animated on the bench during a third-period timeout after the Kings cut a 5-0 deficit to 5-2.

“Taking care of the puck, being harder in our zone,” Matthews said of the message. “There were times in the game, early in the second, in the third period, where the momentum shifted and we needed to grab it back.”

PATCHES SITS

Toronto winger Max Pacioretty was a healthy scratch after dressing the first three games.

“There’s no message,” Berube said of the 35-year-old’s omission. “We have extra players and not everybody can play every night. That’s the bottom line. He’s been fine when he’s played, but I’ve got to make decisions as a coach, and I’m going to make those decisions — what I think is best for the team.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

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The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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