Just a handful of games into the 2025-26 NHL regular season, the Montreal Canadiens are cooking.
There’s no shortage of excellent stories to write about as the Habs have burst into the season in the way fans were hoping they would last year when they pronounced their intention to be ‘in the mix.’ This year is clearly quite different, with the big additions added to the roster in the form of Noah Dobson, Zachary Bolduc, and Ivan Demidov. What has caught my eye more than anything else so far, though, is the impact of the continued growth of the roster on known quantities.
When the Canadiens acquired Dobson over the summer, I think most of us were wondering what that meant for Mike Matheson. Since he was acquired in the trade that sent Jeff Petry to Pittsburgh, Matheson has been the Canadiens’ uncontested number-one defenceman for most of the last three seasons, playing nearly five minutes per game more than the Canadiens’ next most-used defenceman, Kaiden Guhle.
The emergence of Lane Hutson last season changed Matheson’s role, stripping him of valuable power-play time and boosting his time on the penalty kill. Still, he played over 25 minutes per game last season, and saw his point production cut in half from the season before.
The physical specimen from Pointe-Claire, Quebec in Montreal’s West Island is a unique player with exceptional skating and better than average stick-checking to go along with a level of endurance that feels absurd at times. On the rebuilding Canadiens, Matheson was a steadying, veteran force that helped to insulate a young, developing blue line.
That insulation he provided didn’t exactly help his own metrics though, and being constantly overextended as both the top shutdown option and the guy who was depended upon to get the puck up the ice and create offence led to frequent misplays, and the consequential criticism from fans and media.
The Peter Principle is a managerial concept that describes a situation where a person is promoted due to legitimate good work to a position over their level of competence, or too outside their skill set to be successful. That doesn’t mean the person doesn’t have value to an organization, just that they’re not in the proper slot to be most effective.
My impression of Matheson during this period has been that he’s a very good hockey player who has flaws, and is not best suited as the number-one guy. By the playoffs last season, it was Hutson who was playing the highest-leverage minutes, and while Matheson still played a ton of minutes, the impact on him was palpable.
Enter Noah Dobson
The acquisition of Alexandre Carrier last season had a visible positive impact on Matheson’s gameplay, but the two players were used almost sacrificially by Martin St-Louis and the coaching staff in order to unleash Hutson as a tour-de-force opponents couldn’t counter. While it worked to make the other two defensive pairings effective, that pairing struggled by the numbers even if they looked good.
While Carrier is a very good defenceman, Dobson is a legitimate number-one defenceman, and the impact of that talent injection on Matheson has been revolutionary.
We’re dealing with minuscule sample sizes here, so we have to be suitably cagey about any conclusions we draw, but one of the purposes of using a wide swath of metrics is to glean the most information possible from a small sample that should be somewhat reliable.
While Matheson’s ice time per game is down from 25:05 last season to 22:50, he is still currently leading the Canadiens in ice time per game, with Dobson (22:22) and Hutson (22:14) right behind him, and at the very least when you look at the on-ice metrics from a distance, you’ve got to be thinking “so far, so good,” right?
Spending three seasons as Mr. Everything, including being a sacrificial lamb in many ways, Matheson’s work insulating the young Canadiens’ defencemen has paid off in their development behind him. Combine that with having an extremely versatile, reliable star-quality partner in Dobson, and suddenly Matheson looks like his best self nearly every shift.
Dobson’s mobility, physicality, offensive and defensive instincts, and ability to read the game have given Matheson both a more defined role and more freedom to roam within that role with the confidence that his partner has his back. Those relative numbers will drop into more reasonable ranges as the season goes on, but with a role more naturally fit for him with more support surrounding him, Matheson has the potential for a renaissance season just in time for a new contract.
Top line boosting
Especially with small samples, one of the things you want to check in on is how much a player’s on-ice metrics are impacted by playing with specific players. In Montreal, we know that the top line of Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, and Juraj Slafkovský drives play very well. Spending more time with that line at five-on-five is going to lead to better metrics for anyone. Because of this, we should always be careful making big pronouncements before we check in on who a player is sharing the ice with.
So far this season, the Suzuki line has been beyond words dominant. As a line, their share of shot attempts is 71.1%, shots 75.9%, goals 76.6%, expected goals 71.2%. So have Matheson and Dobson received an outsized share of that ice time, boosting their results?
The best way to check is to compare the percent of Suzuki’s ice time that he shares with Matheson each season using Evolving-Hockey’s teammate tool.
In 2022-23, Matheson had Suzuki’s line with him 37.8% of the time at five-on-five, in 2023-24 that was 42.8% of the time, in 2024-25 they were together for 39.1% of Matheson’s ice time, and so far in 2025-26 Suzuki has been on the ice for just 31.4% of Matheson’s ice time.
That means Matheson is getting less of a push from the top line than ever before.
Trickle-down talent
Trickle-down economics isn’t real, but trickle-down talent in a team structure is. The additions the Canadiens have made at forward and defence have drastically increased their depth, and so far the results are incredibly strong.
Canva didn’t want to let me set the x-axis to cross the y-axis at 50 per cent, so I had to cut the y-axis to make the variance stand out more, but when observing this chart, please take note that the y-axis does not start at 0, but at 40%.
Going season by season, we can see the trajectory of the Canadiens’ rebuild. From a crumbling team in 2021 that sold off big pieces only to be worse the following season, to slow growth the next two years. This season appears to be a huge leap forward, though again, it’s very early. Where that improvement has come from though, should encourage everyone who has a rooting interest in the Habs.
Defensive maturation
With the addition of Dobson on defence and the growth of young players on the roster, moving the needle on the defensive side of the puck was to be expected coming into this season. Defensive play has been the club’s biggest weakness under Martin St-Louis, as he has prioritized a bit of freedom for his young players so that they can make mistakes and learn to find the best play.
It’s not just the young who have seen huge improvements though. A big reason why Matheson’s underlying numbers have been so strong so far is due to wildly improved defensive results. The previous three seasons, Matheson had seen his personal on-ice expected-goals-against rate per 60 minutes sit at an uninspiring 3.06, 3.00, and 3.03. This season, the Canadiens are only allowing 2.06 expected goals against per 60 while Matheson is on the ice, a nearly 50% improvement. That has held through the roster.
Over the previous four seasons, the Canadiens have ranked 31st, 31st, 28th, and 31st in high-danger chances against per 60, one of the league’s worst defensive teams. This is part of the reason I tend to raise my eyebrows at criticisms of Samuel Montembeault. This year so far, no team is allowing high-danger chances against at a lower rate than Montreal.
That kind of flip of the script is pretty unlikely to last, I’m honestly not sure if any team has ever pulled off a year-over-year improvement like that, but the early returns are a sign that the team is beginning to reach some defensive maturity, with enough depth on the roster to no longer feel lost when the top line needs to rest.
As disastrous as the Canadiens were defensively to start in 2024-25, that’s how good they’ve been to start this season. How well these improvements will hold as the Canadiens face a wider variety and better quality opponents remains to be seen, but the early returns are phenomenal.
Andrew Berkshire is the former managing editor of Eyes on the Prize, and the founder of Game Over Network Inc. A Canadian, employee-owned sports media startup focused on platforming young creators across the country. Find Andrew live on YouTube after Habs games with Game Over Montreal, where you can also find Marc Dumont, Kay Imam, and Conor Tomalty to bring you interactive postgame analysis. You can join the Game Over Network’s Discord, and support us on Patreon as we employ over 30 young sports journalists and analysts across Canada’s seven NHL markets.
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