Off night from top players sinks Canadiens in loss to Senators Eric Engels - Sportsnet.ca | Canada News Media
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Off night from top players sinks Canadiens in loss to Senators Eric Engels – Sportsnet.ca

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MONTREAL — It was Reverse Retro, Role Reversal Night at the Bell Centre Thursday, with the Ottawa Senators snapping a nine-game winless streak with a 3-2 win over the Montreal Canadiens, who looked nothing like themselves — from the jerseys they were wearing to the way they played.

You usually don’t win if your best players aren’t your best players — even if you have the best record in the NHL and you’re playing against the team with the worst one. And you definitely don’t win if your best players show up as your worst.

If the Canadiens came into Thursday’s game with a 7-1-2 record, it was in large part thanks to the elite performance Nick Suzuki had authored as their No. 1 centre. But, against the Senators, he looked nothing like the guy who played wise beyond his 21 years, the guy who played a patient, cerebral and highly-effective game at both ends of the ice.

“It was definitely a tough night,” Suzuki said afterwards. “Definitely my worst game of the year so far. I was fighting the puck a bit.”

He was at war with the puck in the faceoff circle, where he lost all but four of 15 draws — including one cleanly to Connor Brown that led to the setup of the game-winning goal, which Brown himself tipped in after he shook Suzuki in coverage.

“Can’t be losing that many draws — especially on that third goal there,” Suzuki said. “I lost it pretty clean and it ended up in our net.

“Tonight I was struggling to read the play a bit,” he added. “There was a few times where I was getting lost in the defensive zone, and that’s not something I’m used to, so I gotta definitely clean that up.”

Many of the players who helped Suzuki and the Canadiens off to their torrid start have some polishing to do before Saturday’s rematch against the Senators in Ottawa.

Tyler Toffoli, who came into the game as the NHL’s leading goal scorer (9) didn’t touch the puck outside of five relatively harmless shot attempts — only one of which came from less than 25 feet out.

Josh Anderson drew a penalty with a solid drive down the middle in the third period, and he scored his seventh of the season shorthanded with 1:29 remaining, but he was stuck in neutral through the first 40 minutes. Actually, he was stuck mostly in the defensive zone over the first two periods, where he, Suzuki and Jonathan Drouin got hemmed in and gave up 13 shot attempts versus the four they generated at the other end.

Jeff Petry, who came into the game leading all NHL defencemen in scoring (13 points), said after Monday’s win over the Vancouver Canucks, in which he registered two goals and an assist, “There’s times the puck’s your friend.”

On Thursday, the puck was Petry’s enemy, as he juggled it and struggled to connect on the passes he usually makes with his eyes closed. It wasn’t kind to him when it rang off the post on a late Montreal power play, either.

At least Phillip Danault (two assists), Brendan Gallagher (one goal) and Tomas Tatar (one assist) brought it after not factoring in as much as some of the other players through the first 10 games.

“They were our best line by far,” said Canadiens coach Claude Julien. “Those three played well, and we saw some of the chemistry they’ve shown in the past.”

They were dominant throughout, but particularly in a first period that saw them produce nine shot attempts and eight scoring chances to one against their Senators opposition.

The one the Danault line allowed? A good shot from Thomas Chabot with 39 seconds to go in the opening frame for Ottawa’s first goal.

Was it great? Let’s just say it wasn’t as good as the one Senators rookie Tim Stützle scored on 18 seconds later, with Petry looking on from the penalty box.

It would be fair to say Carey Price would’ve liked to have had one, if not both of them — as he once told us after a tough loss in Tampa Bay several years ago, “I believe I should stop them all.”

Price definitely wants to stop the ones where he has a clear line of sight on the puck, even if the shots are top quality.

He’s supposed to be Montreal’s best player, but he hasn’t been that too often in the early portion of this season, with his .899 save percentage being a reflection of that. He has been good enough to win four of his seven starts, and had he been a bit better on this night, he could’ve made the difference.

Not that Price was the reason the Canadiens lost. Far from it.

“I thought that we were fighting the puck tonight,” said Julien, who was pointing out what was plain to see. “Even if the first period wasn’t that bad, them scoring two goals in the last minute of it hurt. In the second, we weren’t there at all from a performance standpoint. We fought the puck even on simple plays and passes. We came back in the third, but it wasn’t a big game from us.”

Perhaps the biggest evidence of that could be found on the power play, where the Canadiens whiffed on four opportunities —including a 5-on-3 in the second period. They took seven shots with the man-advantage, and Senators goaltender Matt Murray had a clean look at every single one of them.

Julien pointed to cleanly-lost faceoffs as one issue in that department. But he also acknowledged there was another problem there.

“We’re moving the puck around, but I think at some point there we’ve just gotta find a way to finish,” he said. “You gotta create some chances, and sometimes it’s just a little adjustment here or there as far as the mindset is concerned. Not so much what the plays we’re utilizing or trying to use during the power play; it’s more of a mindset, and we’ve gotta find ways to get maybe that little hunger at trying to finish around the net area or scoring those goals when you do get the scoring chances.”

The Canadiens were about as hungry on the power play as John Candy after eating that 72-ounce steak in “The Great Outdoors,” which is to say they weren’t hungry at all (and if any of you youngsters haven’t seen “The Great Outdoors,” get on it).

The guys in the blue retro jerseys just didn’t have it on this night. And the guys wearing white, red and black, who haven’t had it in a month, showed up and played a good game.

“Give Ottawa credit for playing hard and competing well,” said Julien.

His Canadiens will have to recapture what they had before this game come Saturday, when they’re back in their traditional jerseys.

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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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