Coming into Montreal Canadiens training camp, William Trudeau was in the spotlight as a player who could surprise. He was the captain of the team at the rookie tournament in Buffalo. He was coming off of a very strong first professional season that ended with him playing in every situation. Last Saturday, in the second game of the AHL season, he was a healthy scratch.
Rocket head coach Jean-François Houle said that Trudeau had been struggling since the start of AHL camp after being sent down by the Canadiens.
“It’s more than one game,” he said. “I think the last week or two, he wasn’t the William Trudeau that we knew. He’s still young, he’s 21, and it’s OK. When I spoke to him [before the game on Saturday] I told him it’s alright. Take a step back, we’ll do a little reset and everything will go well.”
AHL coaches have it tough. Everyone expects prospects to be the priority and play games, but what happens when they struggle? A few years ago, in an interview, Rochester Americans head coach Seth Appert who was coaching a team with most of the top Buffalo Sabres prospects now in the NHL said something that has stuck with me since he said it.
“Ice time without accountability is not development,” he said. “They need to have the opportunity for ice time, but they need to keep earning that ice time.”
“If we send [Trudeau] on the ice without accountability, it’s not good for the team,” Houle said, as if he was aware of Appert’s comments from a completely different interview years earlier. “Everyone needs to be accountable.”
That’s the dilemma that Houle has where through two games, young prospects like Trudeau, Xavier Simoneau, Riley Kidney, Jared Davidson, Filip Mešar, and Jan Mysak were healthy scratches for at least one of the two games.
Houle is aware of the fact that these players who don’t play need to do something in the meantime because the deep bench won’t last forever. Already since Saturday’s game, the Montreal Canadiens have lost Kirby Dach for the season, and Kaiden Guhle left Tuesday’s game. The Rocket lost Emil Heineman, who is out indefinitely after Saturday’s game, and it was announced Wednesday morning that captain Gabriel Bourque is out with a lower body injury and will continue to be evaluated.
“You have to make sure you take care of them. We do a lot of video, we have our development people who are around, a lot of times they’ll go on the ice with them and do extra drills. We need to make sure we keep those guys ready in case they play or to learn. They’re here to learn.”
Houle said in the case of Mešar, who has yet to play a regular season game this season, a decision will need to be made in the next few weeks about where he’s playing but quickly added that he may see AHL game time in the near future.
One thing that stood out over last weekend was the fact that the Abbotsford Canucks were a lot more cohesive. They brought back almost the same roster from a year ago, whereas the Rocket were still getting to know each other.
Lias Andersson, who scored two goals on Saturday, said that a lot of the missed plays will improve with time. He also mentioned he’s still getting to know people off the ice, nevermind what they’ll be doing on the ice.
It’s something Houle agrees with and why he thinks we won’t see the real potential of the Rocket until around Christmas time.
“You have to remember that we lost 70% of our team. All these guys are brand new so they don’t know our structure that we had the last few years, we have a lot of young kids,” Houle said. “I know you guys put expectations high and that’s fine but you need to realize that we lost a lot of players that were here for the last two years. It’s a big turnover. In our defensive zone we have a lot of things to fix, in our neutral zone.”
Another thing is team identity. The teams the Rocket have had in the last two years, but even since they came to Laval, was a hard-working, hard-checking team. With so many young talented players coming into the fold, do they take on the team identity from the past, or do they dictate the identity going forward? Well, Houle said, it’s a process.
“We would like to implement our identity that we had the last few years to these players but it doesn’t always work like that because they have to form their own identity,” Houle said. “When you have a lot of new people, and you can see right now they’re looking at how the coach reacts and they’re looking at each other to see who’s getting power play time, who’s getting PK time, they’re reading into a lot of things and it’s totally normal. It’s like that in any business. You have new people in a business they’ll do the same thing. They’ll check the manager, see all the moves he makes. It’s going to take a little bit of time before we gel and get the ball rolling. Plus we have a lot of players so that can be another issue.”
The Rocket will continue their four-game homestand with games at Place Bell against the Rochester Americans on Wednesday and Friday. They play their first road game of the season on Saturday in Belleville against the Senators.
Today we also launched the debut episode of ‘The Launch Pad’, a bi-weekly podcast look at the Laval Rocket. You can check out the episode below or wherever you enjoy your podcasts. Once the PWHL season gets underway, we intend Wednesdays to be a weekly rotation between The Launch Pad and a Women’s Hockey Wednesday episode.
