Habs fire Julien despite 5-on-5 dominance

Special teams need to improve but this is a curious decision

Feb 24, 2021

The Montreal Canadiens have fired head coach Claude Julien, along with assistant coach Kirk Muller.

The Habs had a 9-5-4 record but have just one win in the past six games. They have overtime and shootout losses against the Ottawa Senators in the past two games, and those were presumably the final nails in his coaching coffin.

The Canadiens are firing the coach of a team that ranks second in the league in score-and-venue-adjusted Corsi (55.9 CF%), behind only Colorado. The Canadiens are first in score-and-venue-adjusted shot ratio (57.3 SF%), first in score-and-venue-adjusted expected goal ratio (57.4 xGF%) and first in score-and-venue-adjusted goal ratio (63.6 GF%). Do they expect that the new coach is going to give them better results than that?

Scott Cullen @ByScottCullen

The Canadiens have fired Claude Julien, head coach of a team that is second in score-and-venue-adjusted (sva) Corsi (55.9 CF%) behind Colorado. The Habs are first in sva shot ratio (57.3 SF%), first in sva expected goal ratio (57.4 xGF%) and first in sva goal ratio (63.6 GF%).

Montreal does have problems, mostly related to special teams.

The Habs rank 19th in goals/60 (6.72) during 5-on-4 play, with zero power play goals in the past six games. Two weeks ago, before this six-game slide started, Montreal ranked 13th in goals/60 (8.67) during 5-on-4 play, a mere .01 behind the Edmonton Oilers, the team that had far-and-away the best power play in the league last season.

Montreal is ranked 24th in goals against/60 (8.35) at 4-on-5, with allowing five goals against in the past six games. Two weeks ago, they ranked 18th, with 7.21 goals against per 60 minutes of 4-on-5 play. Now, they do take too many penalties. Is that on the coach? Or is that on the players?

Here are the Montreal Canadiens with the worst penalty differentials (on a rate basis, minimum 50 minutes of 5-on-5 playing time):

Brett Kulak

Josh Anderson

Victor Mete

Phillip Danault

Shea Weber

Nick Suzuki

Jonathan Drouin

Corey Perry

Which of those guys is playing too much? Kulak has been scratched to get Mete in the lineup and it would be a little unseemly to pin the problem on guys playing 6th and 7th D minutes.

Danault has not had a good season, at all, but his ice time is also down 2:29 per game compared to last season.

Is it time to cut Shea Weber’s minutes? I doubt that is happening.

So does that leave us with Anderson, Suzuki, and Drouin? It turns out that their most consistent scoring line takes too many penalties.

The players that are drawing more penalties than they take? Joel Armia, Brendan Gallagher, and Jake Evans.

The Canadiens were also 0-4 in overtime and shootout games this season which did not serve to enhance their record.

None of this means that Dominique Ducharme can’t do the job. Maybe he can. He has coached in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and coached Canada at the World Juniors but this is his fhird season as an assistant coach in the National Hockey League. The fairest evaluation would probably be that we just don’t know how good he will be as an NHL coach, and that’s quite a choice when replacing a coach whose team has been utterly dominant during 5-on-5 play this season, as Micah’s viz tells the story here:

Micah Blake McCurdy @IneffectiveMath

Quick state of the habs at the coaching change. At 5v5, extremely good. Away from 5v5, extremely bad.

How does this all matter for fantasy? Too soon to say. There could be a new coach bump, because the Habs aren’t likely to keep losing five of every six games like they have over the past couple of weeks, but I would be wary of any thinking that they will suddenly take off with better results because as unlucky as they might have been in the past couple of weeks, overall the Habs ranked second in 5-on-5 SV% (.933) and their 8.7 SH% ranked 12th. They weren’t getting jobbed by the percentages and that makes it harder to have dramatically better results in short order.

Tuesday Games

Buffalo 4 New Jersey 1

BUF RW Sam Reinhart 2 A (3 G, 3 A in past 4 GP)

BUF G Linus Ullmark stopped 41 of 42 shots for the win. (.915 SV% in 11 starts)

Pittsburgh 3 Washington 2 (OT)

PIT LW Jake Guentzel 1 G, 1 A (3 G, 6 A in past 7 GP)

PIT RW Kasperi Kapanen 1 G, 1 A

Montreal 4 Ottawa 5 (SO)

OTT LW Brady Tkachuk 2 G (5 G, 2 A in past 6 GP)

OTT RW Drake Batherson 1 G, 1 A (4 G, 2 A in past 5 GP)

MTL D Shea Weber 2 G

MTL C Phillip Danault 2 A

OTT C Chris Tierney was on the ice for three goals against during 5-on-5 play.

MTL D Shea Weber was on the ice for three goals for during 5-on-5 play.

Chicago 6 Columbus 5 (SO)

CBJ LW Patrik Laine 2 G, 1 A (6 G, 4 A in 10 GP with Columbus)

CBJ RW Oliver Bjorkstrand 2 G (3 G, 5 A in past 9 GP)

CBJ RW Cam Atkinson 1 G, 1 A (6 G, 5 A in past 7 GP)

CBJ C Jack Roslovic 2 A (4 G, 8 A in 13 GP with Columbus)

CBJ D Seth Jones 2 A (1 G, 9 A in past 10 GP)

CHI RW Patrick Kane 1 G, 3 A (6 G, 17 A in past 12 GP)

CHI C Carl Soderberg 1 G, 2 A (3 G, 3 A in past 5 GP)

CHI LW Dominik Kubalik 1 G, 1 A

Nashville 2 Detroit 0

DET G Jonathan Bernier stopped 31 of 33 shots in the loss. (.914 SV% in 9 GP)

NSH LW Filip Forsberg 1 G, 1 A (3 G, 3 A in past 5 GP)

NSH D Roman Josi 2 A

NSH G Pekka Rinne 24-save shutout for the W. (.916 SV% in 11 GP)

Edmonton 4 Vancouver 3

VAN C Elias Pettersson 1 G, 1 A (7 G, 9 A in past 15 GP)

EDM LW Dominik Kahun 2 G

EDM C Leon Draisaitl 3 A (2 G, 5 A in past 4 GP)

Digging Deep

The 13th pick in the 2016 Draft, Carolina defenseman Jake Bean has put up 92 points in 129 AHL games over the past two seasons. He’s finally getting a shot with the Hurricanes and has five assists in eight games this season, with all of those assists coming in the past five games. He also had seven shots on goal Monday against Tampa Bay. Bean still doesn’t play a lot but his ice time has increased in the past couple of games and he is getting some second unit power play time. He is rostered in 1% of Yahoo leagues.