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Canadiens Game Day: Carey Price will be in goal vs. Senators – Montreal Gazette

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Goalie has struggled this season with a 5-4-3 record, a 3.13 goals-against average and a .888 save percentage.

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While some Canadiens fans might have lost confidence in goalie Carey Price, interim head coach Dominique Ducharme hasn’t.

That’s why Price will be in goal for the Canadiens when they play the Ottawa Senators Tuesday night at the Bell Centre (7 p.m., TSN2, TSN5, RDS, TSN 690 Radio, 98.5 FM).

Price has struggled this season with a 5-4-3 record, a 3.13 goals-against average and a .888 save percentage. But Ducharme said after Tuesday’s morning skate that he’s confident Price will bounce back after working with goalie coach Stéphane Waite.

“He worked on a lot of things with Stéphane Waite,” Ducharme said. “I’m not going to go into detail about it. It’s very specific work that Stéphane does with our goaltenders. We feel that he’s ready, both physically and mentally. That’s why he’s in goal tonight. We aren’t worried. We know he’ll bounce back.”

In his last start, Price allowed five goals on 29 shots in a 6-3 loss to the Jets last Thursday night in Winnipeg (the sixth goal was into an empty net). It marked the fourth time in his 12 starts this season that Price has allowed five goals and he has given up 14 goals in his last three games while going 0-2-1. Price has a 1-4-1 record in his last six games.

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Going back to last season, Price has allowed at least four goals in nine of his last 17 regular-season games.

Backup goalie Jake Allen has a 4-2-2 record this season with a 2.12 goals-against average and a .929 save percentage. The Canadiens were shut out in both of Allen’s regulation-time losses.

The Canadiens are in fourth place in the North Division with a 9-6-5 record, are winless in their last five games (0-2-3) and have a 2-5-3 record in their last 10. The Canadiens have lost three of their first four games against the Senators this season, including one in overtime and one in a shootout.

Forward Paul Byron said the Canadiens still have a lot of confidence in Price.

“Everyone on this team still believes that he’s the best goaltender in the world,” Byron said. “I think we’re giving up too many good scoring chances when he’s in goal. We can’t allow those kinds of chances. We have to play smart. We have to be careful not to make costly mistakes. We have a lot of confidence in our team and in Carey.”

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The Senators are in last place in the North Division with a 8-15-1 record and did the Canadiens a favour Monday night when they beat the Calgary Flames 5-1 in Ottawa. The fifth-place Flames (10-11-2) are one point behind Montreal with the Canadiens holding three games in hand. The top four teams make the playoffs.

The Senators have a 4-1-0 record in their last five games.

“We took steps in the right direction last game,” Byron said about Saturday night’s 2-1 overtime loss to the Jets in Winnipeg with Allen in goal. “We played well. We were on the attack a lot and generated chances. We have to find a way to put pucks in the net tonight. We must stay disciplined. Good things are going to happen for our team. We know the Senators have a young team that is very good on the power play, so we must stay out of the box to avoid giving them confidence.”

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With the condensed 56-game NHL season, Ducharme was asked if he has thought about going with a merit-based system for his goaltenders and riding the hot hand.

“I have one thing that I think when we think about standings and stuff like that,” the coach said. “It’s not that we don’t look at it, but I’m a firm believer that we’re going to finish where we deserve to finish. It’s much more important to control the things that you can control and we’re confident with that. The way that we’re going to be handling ourselves, kind of the plan that we have, if we’re strong into that plan and that process and that way of thinking we’re going to be where we deserve to be.

“With the goaltenders, I think it’s too early to really go and say it’s going to be that way,” Ducharme added. “I think it’s a feel right now and we’ll take it day-by-day.”

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Joey Daccord will start in goal for the Senators. The 24-year-old has only played in one game this season, stopping all five shots he faced in one period of a 6-3 loss to the Flames on Feb. 27. The only other NHL game Daccord has ever played was during the 2018-19 season when he allowed five goals in a 5-2 loss to the Buffalo Sabres.

The Senators selected Daccord in the seventh round (199th overall) of the 2015 NHL Draft.

This Game Day notebook will be updated after Tuesday night’s game.

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The lines

Josh Anderson skated before his teammates took the ice Tuesday morning and will miss his second straight game with a lower-body injury.

Here’s how the forward lines and defence pairings looked at the morning skate:

Tatar – Danault – Gallagher
Drouin – Suzuki – Toffoli
Lehkonen – Kotkaniemi – Armia
Byron – Evans – Perry

Chiarot – Weber
Edmundson – Petry
Kulak – Romanov

Here’s how the two power-play units looked at the morning skate:

Armia
Drouin – Toffoli – Suzuki
Weber

Perry
Kotkaniemi – Gallagher – Tatar
Petry

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Building confidence

Apart from having to replace the injured Anderson, Ducharme will stick with the same lineup for his third game as an NHL head coach while still looking for his first win.

Ducharme has been trying to put in a new system since taking over from Claude Julien last Wednesday and has only had two full practices as the interim head coach — one last Friday in Winnipeg and one Monday in Brossard.

But Ducharme said he liked what he saw in Saturday night’s 2-1 OT loss in Winnipeg when the Canadiens outshot the Jets 41-21 and dominated most of the play five-on-five. The Jets’ goal in regulation time came on a power play. Ducharme said he wants to keep his lines together to help build confidence until the players have a full understanding of the system he wants to play.

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“We want to be so in sync at one point that we can move guys around and it wouldn’t change the way that we play,” the coach said. “The way that we know that the options are going to be there, there and there. And then, after that, once you create that one night then you can move a guy around because he’s got a better night or an off-night or you see a better chemistry you can start maybe trying out things and see different chemistry that maybe could be built.

“We’re working on that core of our game at creating those habits,” Ducharme added. “I don’t want us to react, I want us to act. But acting within those certain rules. So that’s the most important thing right now for me.”

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Problems in OT

The Canadiens have lost three games in overtime and two in shootouts this season and have yet to win a game that went beyond regulation time.

The Senators have won two games in overtime, won another in a shootout and have only lost one in OT.

Joel Armia, who was on the ice along with Phillip Danault and Jeff Petry when the Canadiens lost 2-1 in OT to the Jets last Saturday, was asked Tuesday morning why he thinks his team has struggled in OT.

“I don’t know,” he said.

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Working with Armia

Ducharme said last week that Armia has “world-class qualities” as a player and that he’s working with the 6-foot-3, 212-pound right-winger to make him more consistent.

Armia scored two goals in Ducharme’s first game as head coach when he was given a season-high 16:38 of ice time. Armia added an assist in Ducharme’s second game while logging 16:36 of ice time, his second-highest total of the season. Armia has also been given a spot on the first power-play unit.

“For me, just going out there every single shift, working hard, staying on the forecheck, staying on the puck,” Armia said about what Ducharme expects from him. “Kind of just doing my thing, so that’s it.

“I think he’s been really good help for me the past years (as an assistant coach) and I really like him as a coach,” Armia added.

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As for his role on the power play, Armia said: “Stay net front, kind of screen the goalie. If there’s any puck battles in the corner, I think that’s kind of my job to go in there and try to get those loose pucks back for the team.”


  1. Stu Cowan: Pressure is on new Canadiens head coach Dominique Ducharme


  2. Canadiens’ Jonathan Drouin has long history with team’s new head coach

What’s next?

The Canadiens have a practice scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday at the Bell Sports Complex in Brossard before facing the Winnipeg Jets Thursday night at the Bell Centre (7 p.m., TSN2, RDS, TSN 690 Radio, 98.5 FM). The Canadiens have a day off scheduled for Friday before facing the Jets again on Saturday night at the Bell Centre (7 p.m., SNE, SNW, CITY, TVA Sports, TSN 690 Radio, 98.5 FM).

The Canadiens will then fly to Vancouver on Sunday to start a six-game Western Canada road trip.

scowan@postmedia.com

twitter.com/StuCowan1

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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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