Since the season ended nearly a month ago, I’ve taken some time to think about how everything unfolded for the Canadiens.

That’s probably too long. A month? Come on, guy. Apex Legends isn’t that fun.

Okay, yes it is.

I have mostly positive feelings about the 2018-19 season that the Canadiens had. Even though they missed the playoffs, how can you not? The team that was supposed to score five goals all year found themselves towards the top of the league in five on five offense, racked up 96 points in the standings, and missed the playoffs despite being in the race until the day off between game 81 and game 82.

I don’t think the season was a failure by any stretch of the imagination, but there is room to improve. The current iteration of Marc Bergevin’s Canadiens still has some baby fat and they find themselves in a unique kind of crunch. In a salary cap world, most teams find themselves counting pennies and relying on entry level stars to provide more than they’re worth.

The Canadiens’ crunch is centered around the 20 active roster spots and, more specifically, the 12 used for forwards. Bergevin loaded up on depth players at the deadline and loved his new acquisitions so much that he decided to keep them around. Jordan Weal and Nate Thompson are on the roster for next season thanks to new contracts, as is Dale Weise, who has one more year remaining on his deal.

Add to that the possibility Ryan Poehling and Nick Suzuki could challenge for roster spots come next season, and the Habs could be looking at having 17 forwards under NHL contracts in October, barring other moves (I’m counting on Charles Hudon playing for another team next season). And because the role of those additions and the impact they may have on the lineup is unknown, maybe it’s time we take stock of what we have, or what we think we might have.

After the 2018-19 season, I had three questions.

Which Jonathan Drouin is the real one?

That was answered last week, or at least put on hold, as we learned that Jonathan Drouin was playing with a broken nose. Hopefully with a nose that is intact, we can see Drouin finish the season as he started it.

What the hell went wrong with the powerplay?

I’ve tried to answer this a few times, and maybe I can take another crack before the end of the summer, but I think this team’s special teams need a shift in philosophy. Both could be better, but the powerplay needs to be better.

And my last question based on situations that are currently within the Canadiens’ control surrounds the season Artturi Lehkonen had.

Which Artturi Lehkonen is closest to the real thing?

Maybe I shake the pom-poms for Lehkonen a bit harder than most, but after his 18 goal rookie campaign, I thought this player had even brighter days ahead of him. His sophomore season was spoiled by nagging back issues that limited him to 66 games, and even with his health issues, he still scored 12 times. A step back in your sophomore year is understandable, especially with injuries, so the individual results from that season still didn’t raise any real alarm bells for me.

Then what happened this year? In a year where Lehkonen set a career high in points (31), it still feels like he had more to give. We saw Lehkonen get scoring chance after scoring chance, only to skate back to the bench with a dejected look on his face. At the same time, outside of his offense, Lehkonen seems to have developed into a player Claude Julien trusts to play defensive hockey. It appears that the goalposts keep moving when it comes to defining who Lehkonen will be as an NHL player, and that might be a testament to the versatility of the player. Defining a multi-faceted player by any one skill set paints an incomplete picture.

So who is this guy? And can we be sure the answer to that question won’t change by May 2020?

2018-19 By The Numbers

Since Lehkonen’s step backward seems to involve his new found ability to avoid scoring goals, let’s focus on scoring goals. What do you need to do to score goals?

It would help if you were on the ice.

Okay, now that you’ve picked up your eyes after they rolled across the floor, hear me out.

Lehkonen’s average ice time of 15:33 ranks him ninth on the team among forwards. Simple math, which is not my strong suit, indicates that this makes him a third liner. That sounds about right. If Artturi Lehkonen is on your third line, your life as coach has to be pretty good, right?

Playing, on average, thirty seconds of powerplay time every game, the man advantage wasn’t a big part of Lehkonen’s night. To be fair, it wasn’t a big part of the Canadiens’ night either.

Instead, the hardest minutes of Lehkonen’s night came on the penalty kill, where he played about 2:15 every game. His 186 minutes of ice time shorthanded was second only to Phillip Danault’s insane 202:16 (about 2:30 per game).

In Paul Byron’s absence, Lehkonen was leaned on heavily to kill penalties. With there being nothing special about the Canadiens’ special teams all year, Lehkonen’s large role on the penalty kill probably allowed them to maintain a league average kill without some key penalty killers in the lineup (chiefly Byron and Shea Weber early in the season).

Okay, so maybe he could have his shorthanded minutes dialed down, but he’s not exactly being overworked. Ice time shouldn’t be a factor. Lehkonen still played, on average, roughly 12:45 of even strength hockey every game, and if penalty killing is something he excels at, he should play as much as possible on the penalty kill.

But if you look below him on the Habs forward list, the names below him in even strength ice time aren’t all that inspiring. The only full-time, healthy Canadien below Lehkonen on the list is Jesperi Kotkaniemi, who played three fewer games and had a sheltered role down the stretch.

Okay, so maybe you can play him more. There’s one potential way to find more goals for Lehkonen.

What else do you need to score? Having the puck seems important, and that’s something the Canadiens did well all season. Lehkonen was no stranger to strong puck possession, and actually found himself among the top forwards on the team in puck possession. In five on five score and venue adjusted Corsi, here’s how the top five Habs’ forwards shook out (via Naturalstattrick.com):

Tomas Tatar – 59.22% Brendan Gallagher – 59.18% Jesperi Kotkaniemi – 57.50% Phillip Danault – 57.00% Artturi Lehkonen – 54.03%

First of all, Tomas frigging Tatar.

Second, this is a good trend for Lehkonen. Opponents of analytics argue that Corsi isn’t important because it’s just shot attempts with no real weight. There is some truth to that, which I’ll address next, but the point of possession stats like Corsi isn’t to say that because player X had the puck more, they should score more goals. It’s far less direct than that. It’s more that because player X had the puck a lot, they should be in a position to get more chances than their opponents. Hopefully more of those chances are of the high danger variety, and hopefully more of those chances result in more goals.

And for Lehkonen, that was true. Fifth in the aforementioned possession metric, Lehkonen was also fifth on the team in on-ice scoring chances (504) and fifth in on-ice high-danger scoring chances (210).

More of a visual person? Me too. Thanks to hockeyviz.com, we can see what these shots look like. If you like what I’ve shown below, consider joining their Patreon to see behind the pay wall. There’s some fun stuff to play around with.





That’s an impressive dark spot in the slot. As a left winger, Lehkonen got a decent portion of his chances from the left side, but there’s no mistaking where Lehkonen wants to go with the puck.

And it’s not a bad strategy for success either. While we’ve seen Brendan Gallagher flourish into a more all-around goal scorer over the last two seasons, he made a name for himself in this area of the ice. With 60% of Lehkonen’s shift starts coming in the offensive zone, getting to that spot on the ice is made easier.

So maybe he can play more at even strength, but he certainly has the puck enough and he’s generating chances. The last thing you need in order to score goals in this league is… Well, you need the puck to go in.

That just didn’t happen this year for Lehkonen. I know that seems like a cop out after coming this far, but it just might be the truth.

It makes sense that Lehkonen’s lowest goal total comes in a year when he also has the lowest shooting percentage of his career. Not only does it make sense, but it should make fans feel better that he has a chance to rebound. In 2018-19, Lehkonen shot the puck 176 times and scored 11 times, giving him a shooting percentage of 6.3%. If he scored at his career average shooting percentage of 9.35%, he’d have five more goals.

And that 9.35% isn’t unachievable. This season, the average shooting percentage around the league was around nine percent, with goalies stopping 91% of shots. So if Lehkonen just re-rolled the dice on this season and got a more favorable role, he could be looking at totals that look more like his first season than his second season.

This fun graphic from HockeyViz.com shows that this rebound may have been underway towards the end of the season.

Again, if you want access to the graphs behind the paywall, make sure to go to hockeyviz.com and subscribe to their Patreon.

Lehkonen’s primary points per sixty took a sharp dive in the middle of the season, but might have shown signs of life at the end of the season with a small swing back in the other direction.

The graph below shows that the thoughts about ice time might have some truth. As his ice time increased, so did his primary points per sixty. Maybe playing him more will help.

You know what else might help? Shooting to score.

I don’t have a good way to quantify this, but Lehkonen had an uncharacteristically bad shooting season. His scoring slump insisted on itself, as his shot selections became illustrative of a struggling player. Prime scoring chances ended with a puck sailing over the net, with the goalie taking a wrist shot in the chest, or with shooting chances being exchanged for passing opportunities that weren’t there. He was in his own head towards the end of the season.

Remember earlier when I said that Corsi doesn’t directly result in goals? This is the proof of that. Scoring chances don’t directly result in goals either. Pucks crossing the goal line do. Goaltending is certainly voodoo and is in a league of its own on the “I have no idea what’s going on here” scale, but goal scoring isn’t too far behind. If you get as many shot attempts as Lehkonen does from the slot, you should expect to have a couple more go in the net. Especially in a season where offense was up league wide and especially when you have an NHL quality shot.

I mean, remember Lehkonen’s shot from his rookie season? The release on his wrist shot was quick and the shot was hard and accurate. Where did that go? He scored twice in the Canadiens’ first round exit to the Rangers in 2017 and he looked like a player who was built for the playoffs. With his playoff pedigree solidified after his last playoff run for Frölunda of the Swedish Hockey League, where he scored 19 points in 16 games to set the record for playoff scoring.

Maybe Lehkonen is a little like a former Canadien who showed promise in the regular season, played solid defensive hockey, but reserved his offense for the playoffs.

Does that sound like Lars Eller to anyone else?

It’s unfortunate for a myriad of reasons that the Canadiens have missed the playoffs in two consecutive seasons, but the inability to see how the Habs’ young players play in the playoffs has to be high up on the list. We only have one short look at Lehkonen as a playoff performer so far.

And maybe Lehkonen has an Eller-like coming out party in the Habs’ next playoff series. At just 23 years old, it seems unfair to define Lehkonen by any one of his three seasons after realizing that each of his seasons were vastly different in circumstance and role.

It’s quite possible the 18 goal rookie campaign is a one-off and maybe he doesn’t come close to 20 goals in his career. Even so, Lehkonen provides value to the roster in his defensive play and his possession.

With the roster crunch as a backdrop to future roster decisions, Lehkonen’s all-around play needs to be considered when determining his role on the roster. If his story continues like it did for Eller, Montreal will have a large hole to fill up front, with Lehkonen logging big minutes on the penalty kill and providing a solid defensive presence from the wing.

As the team heads into the roster crunch, Lehkonen also hits restricted free agency with the possibility for arbitration. If it gets that far, which Marc Bergevin has rarely allowed, save for one important outlier, an interesting conversation will play out on the value of the player and his role on the team moving forward.

If the value is right, I would hope that Lehkonen is back on the team next season and for the foreseeable future.

Follow Ian on Twitter @BoisvertIan and follow @RabidHabs for more updates!

