A Playoff Berth Means Nothing If You Can't Stop the Puck

The 6-4 record over the last ten games looks fine. It is not fine. Montreal has been allowing 3.1 goals per game over that same stretch — up from 2.5 over the prior twenty games. That half-goal-per-game climb is the number that should be keeping people in the organization awake, because it didn't arrive during a soft patch in November or a December road trip. It arrived now, with the playoffs locked in and Demidov on IR.

That timing matters enormously. When I wrote in late September that the depth problem never actually went away — that the strong finish just obscured it — the defensive numbers were already softening. What's happened since is that the injury cascade has pulled the thread further. Demidov's absence is the headline, and rightly so: 42 points in 50 games, exceptional power-play presence, the player the franchise locked in for eight years because he's the kind of forward you build around. But the defensive erosion predates his exit and has continued through it. These are two separate problems converging on the same moment.

The defensive group still has real talent. Lane Hutson has been one of the best stories of this season — 49 points from the blue line, plus-17, logging over 23 minutes a night. Mike Matheson leads the group in ice time at more than 24 minutes per game. Noah Dobson is a capable third option. On paper, that's a functional top three. But the goals-against trend doesn't care about paper. When a defense that held opponents to 2.5 per game over a 20-game stretch suddenly jumps to 3.1, the question isn't whether it's a blip. It's what changed — and the answer here is pretty clearly the cumulative weight of depleted depth in front of them and the absence of bodies that were supposed to absorb pressure.

The goaltending picture adds another layer of uncertainty. Jakub Dobes and Jacob Fowler have split the workload, and neither has separated himself as a clear stopper heading into the postseason. Kaapo Kahkonen rounds out the group. Three goalies producing at roughly similar rates is not a strength; it's a rotation in search of a reliable answer. When your defense is leaking, you need a goaltender who can steal a game. Montreal's crease situation, as I read it, doesn't obviously provide that.

The center depth concern I flagged two weeks ago now intersects directly with the defensive problem in a way that's hard to ignore. Behind Nick Suzuki — who has been genuinely excellent, 54 points in 49 games and the team's best two-way presence — there is almost nothing. Laurent Dauphin is the nominal backup at center, and his production this season has been negligible. When your second-line center depth is that thin, opposing teams can load up against Suzuki's line, which forces your defense to hold the fort longer and more often. That's a structural loop, and it's tightening at exactly the wrong time.

Montreal clinched. That's real, and it matters. But a playoff berth is an entry ticket, not an outcome. The team that secured that fourth seed was built on defensive consistency and a goal differential that held steady at plus-0.34 per game across 90 games. The team entering the playoffs is allowing goals at a rate that, sustained, would flip that differential negative. The core — Suzuki, Caufield, Hutson, Slafkovsky — is good enough to compete in a short series. Whether the structure around them can hold long enough for that core to matter is the only question left worth asking.