Patrik Laine changed the course of the 2024-25 Montreal Canadiens.
No, not by scoring goals seemingly at will during his first 10 games in a Habs sweater (although that certainly did help), but by bumping Josh Anderson down onto the third line with Christian Dvorak and Brendan Gallagher. Whether he (or anyone) knew it or not, Laine’s presence in the lineup had just created a critical stability in a forward corps that had enjoyed none to that point. A stability that would prove essential to the Canadiens quest for the postseason.
Two months into the 2024-25 NHL season, the Canadiens were not in a good place. Entering December, the Habs sported a conference-worst 8-13-3 record. Things were trending towards another lost season and high draft selection. The forward lines were in disarray, with the Juraj Slafkovský, Nick Suzuki, and Cole Caufield top line spending more time apart more than together. Alex Newhook and Kirby Dach had played significant minutes with six different teammates, Jake Evans with five.
November did mark some seeds being sown for the future. Joel Armia and Emil Heineman had formed a useful duo, and Evans would make it a trio as the month ended. The Canadiens had also experimented with an Anderson, Dvorak, and Gallagher line. Still, all of this was surrounded by an air of impermanence. Slafkovský, Dach, and Newhook were not finding their footing, and the roster had to accommodate a rotation of 12th forwards with unclear roles: Alex Barré-Boulet, Oliver Kapanen, Lucas Condotta, Michael Pezzetta, and most recently Joshua Roy.
Laine’s return to the lineup pushed all of those 12th forwards out of the spotlight and gave the Canadiens a clear dividing line: six established top-six forwards (Suzuki, Caufield, Slafkovský, Newhook, Dach, and Laine) and six established bottom-six forwards (Anderson, Dvorak, Gallagher, Evans, Armia, and Heineman). Now, any adjustment would affect only two lines sharing similar roles rather than three or more.
Before Laine hit the Bell Centre ice on December 3, 2024, the Anderson-Dvorak-Gallagher and Heineman-Evans-Armia lines had only played in the same game on one occasion — but from that night on, they anchored the Canadiens’ bottom six for the rest of December. Slafkovský returned to the top line on December 12 to make it three established lines for the CH. The results were immediate: heading into the month with only eight wins, Montreal added nine to that count in December. When the calendar flipped to 2025, they found themselves a mere three points behind the Ottawa Senators for the final playoff spot.
“Stable lines play better” is hardly rocket science, but for the Canadiens, it marked the difference between making and not making the postseason. The Habs played at a 97 point pace when the first line (Slafkovský-Suzuki-Caufield) was together. They played at a 104 point pace when the third line was intact (Anderson-Dvorak-Gallagher), and they played at a 107 point pace when Heineman, Evans, and Armia formed the fourth line. Most importantly, when all three trios were present in the same game — something that only happened 26 times during the season — the Habs went 16-6-4. A 114 point pace.
The underlying statistics back up these records as well. Each of the three lines put up substantially better numbers than the team average. More importantly, most of these metrics are above the all-important 50 percent threshold.
This isn’t to say that the fourth line was more instrumental to the team’s success than the first line. The first line, after all, shouldered more games without an established bottom six than vice versa. This also isn’t to say that the Canadiens would have maintained a 114 point pace through a whole season. No, this is to say that the Habs’ run to the playoffs, despite seemingly poor underlying metrics, was no fluke of stellar goaltending, unsustainable shooting precision, or simple luck. Rather, the Canadiens found a specific roster configuration that simply clicked and allowed their players to be better than the sum of their parts.
That said, this success also exposed the fragility of this situation. The Canadiens dropped nine of their next fourteen after Heineman was injured by a Salt Lake City motorist. They lost two of three when Laine and Armia missed time on a road trip through the Pacific Northwest. And the untouched first and third trios (+18 shots on goal differential, -1 goal differential, 60% expected goals share) did much better against the Washington Capitals than other forward combinations (-14 SOG, -3 GD, 39% xGF), including the ad hoc second and fourth lines created after Laine’s injury.
In this regard, the Canadiens enter the 2025-26 season back at square one, with an established top trio but questions surrounding the rest of the forward lines. However, the cards that they have been dealt are considerably better. Zachary Bolduc and Ivan Demidov bring many more dimensions and possibilities than Dvorak and Armia. Heineman was a wonderful story, but Kapanen, Roy, Florian Xhekaj, and Owen Beck can all potentially win the audition for the role of breakout rookie. Finally, Sammy Blais and Joe Veleno are more than capable of filling Pezzetta’s skates.
It also helps that the pieces that the Canadiens did retain are the ones capable of holding their own. Evans was more or less the same player whether together with or apart from Heineman and Armia, something that could not be said for the other two. The same goes for Anderson and Gallagher, who were just as effective as a duo as they were a trio with Dvorak — although truthfully, this appears to have more to do with the Canadiens’ honey badger than its powerhorse.
The Canadiens struck gold in 2024-25 when they found the right combinations for three of their four lines. Now, armed with better options and a year’s worth of knowledge and experience, their mission is to do it all over again. Not in the sense that they have to recapitulate last year’s combinations to the letter, but rather to build something just as or more effective, and ideally to do it more quickly than the two months that it took during the first go-around.
If they can manage that, being in the playoffs might just be the beginning of what this team can accomplish.
