MONTREAL — If Tomas Tatar’s value to the Montreal Canadiens wasn’t altogether clear after consecutive seasons of career-high production, it’s now become abundantly so in his short absence.

Sure, the Canadiens pulled out a 6-2 win over a struggling New York Islanders team after Tatar went down with an upper-body injury on his fourth shift of a game on Mar. 3, but they’ve since been outscored by a combined count of 12-3 over three games — including a 4-2 loss to the Nashville Predators on Tuesday.

The Canadiens knew Tatar would be hard to replace, but perhaps they didn’t realize to what extent he was irreplaceable.

It’s funny to consider that and weigh it against the memory of the Slovak touching down in Montreal as the “throw-in” to the deal that sent Max Pacioretty to the Vegas Golden Knights and brought prized prospect Nick Suzuki — along with a 2019 second-round pick — to Montreal in September of 2018. Think back to all the questions Tatar faced about being scratched from 12 of 20 games during Vegas’s run to the Stanley Cup Final, about how he had managed just four goals and two assists in 20 regular-season games after the Golden Knights paid the Detroit Red Wings a first-, a second-, and a third-round pick to acquire him.

It all seems like a distant memory now, with Tatar having immediately gotten back to being the player he was for six seasons in Detroit.

Scratch that, he was better last season than he was in any other season before it — scoring 25 goals and 58 points in 80 games. And damned if he wasn’t performing like a bona fide star this season, with 22 goals and 61 points in 67 games before an awkward collision with Devon Toews knocked him out of action early in Game 68.

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We don’t know how long Tatar will be out. All Canadiens coach Claude Julien said after Tuesday’s loss was that “it’s not a day-to-day thing.”

He also shared that it’s a thing that will heal without surgical intervention, which is good news.

It’d be preferable for that process to unfold quickly, based on what we’ve seen from the Canadiens in Tatar’s absence.

On Tuesday, regular Tatar centre Phillip Danault found a little bit of chemistry with Joel Armia and Paul Byron, but not enough of it to manufacture a goal. And watching regular Tatar linemate Brendan Gallagher fail to record more than one shot on goal at even strength for a second consecutive game was somewhat revealing, considering it had happened exactly zero previous times since Tatar joined the Canadiens.

Of the three new lines Julien assembled after the Canadiens lost 4-0 to the Tampa Bay Lightning and 4-1 to the Florida Panthers in successive games last week, the one that had Gallagher and Charles Hudon flanking Max Domi was the most out of sorts.

As Gallagher explained afterward, chemistry is rarely found in an instant. Of course, he didn’t have to say it was going to be a challenge to find it with anyone else he lined up with after playing over 1,200 minutes at 5-on-5 alongside Danault and Tatar over the past two seasons.

“Every individual’s probably a bit different, but for me personally it always seems to take a little bit of time,” Gallagher said. “I’m a player that you try to read off your linemates as much as possible, and obviously I’ve played with Phil and Tuna for so long and now it’s a new challenge. It’s something you gotta work with. I’m playing with good players still, obviously, but it is a little bit different. Maybe it takes a half second longer to make the play when usually you know somebody’s going to be there and instead you have to take a look.”

Canadiens forward Nick Suzuki broke a nine-game slump with an assist on Artturi Lehkonen’s third-period goal because he was able to find it a bit quicker with his Finnish linemate, and with Jordan Weal.

And hearing him explain why that was the case was fascinating.

“There’s always a learning curve when you’re playing with new players, and for me I just try to read every single guy, their tendencies, watch them in practice,” Suzuki started. “(I) get the opportunity to watch everybody in the game so just when I’m not playing with certain guys, I’m kind of studying them on the bench.”

That this 20-year-old kid even thinks this way is a big part of what made him the coveted piece in the Pacioretty trade. It’s because of this that, over time, Suzuki will find a way to make players around him better. And an even bigger development for the Canadiens will be that, over time, the quality of players around Suzuki will be better than what he has to work with now.

Which brings us back to how important Tatar is now, and moving forward. This team isn’t going to get better subtracting him from the mix, which is something Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin understood well before the NHL’s trade deadline passed on Feb. 24.

Bergevin said it didn’t make sense to trade Tatar just for draft picks when it was clear he could be part of the reason the Canadiens qualify for next year’s playoffs. Based on information we obtained, he didn’t receive a single concrete offer for the winger whose contract — which carries an annual $5.3-million cap hit — is scheduled to expire in the summer of 2021, and that’s because teams were under the impression Bergevin had no interest in moving him.

“There’s players on our team that I feel are very hard to replace,” Bergevin said. “In July, some of these players, I’ll go to them and see if an extension’s possible.”

It was safe to assume he was referring to Gallagher and Danault.

But if Tatar wasn’t on that list before, he probably should be now. All three have earned substantial raises on their own individual merit, but their value as a trio — one that owns a 62 per cent Corsi rating and a plus-30 rating at 5-on-5 over the past two seasons — is what has to be considered.

It’s that much clearer in Tatar’s absence.