Cole Caufield was sitting by a lake in Michigan on Friday, his offseason well underway, as he took questions about winning the Lady Byng, sharing the online space with teammate and friend Nick Suzuki, answering questions about winning the Selke Trophy.
Both of them were relaxed, talking about their individual accomplishments, but always in the context of the Montreal Canadiens and the team’s overall success.
They were serene and able to see what was ahead of them individually and their team with clear eyes, recovered from the disappointment of their playoff exit at the hands of the Carolina Hurricanes a week earlier and able to see the promise those two trophies represented to them in terms of future team success.
“With where our group is, it’s now, and we’re excited for that challenge,” Caufield said, sitting by that lake. “I think every year it’s going to get harder, and we know that, but the work that we’ve put in and we’re still going to put in, I think it’s very promising.
“Hopefully the special times haven’t happened yet.”
If those special times do happen, however, it will be largely based on what happened a week earlier, when things felt less serene, less clear eyed.
As the Canadiens came out one by one Monday to explain the end of their playoff run and the promising season one of the league’s youngest teams had just completed, there was one comment that stood out.
It came from Caufield, and it was jarring in how raw and honest and brutal it was.
“Honestly, I sucked,” he said when asked to assess how his game adapted to the realities of the playoffs. “That’s just plain and simple. I want to be a lot better. I expect a lot more out of myself, and my teammates and coaches do, too. I think there’s a lot more out there. I’m nowhere near satisfied with how that went. Yeah you’re getting tough matchups, but you get that all year. So it has nothing to do with that. I think I can be a lot better, and there’s a long way to go.”
What made it so jarring is how well Caufield had responded to pressure situations in the past. He scored four goals in six games the last time he was in the third round, in 2021 as a rookie. He led the NHL this regular season with five overtime goals and 12 game-winning goals. He was second in even-strength goals with 40.
Caufield’s regular season was defined by his ability to score important goals. His playoffs were defined by a lack of them. He scored six goals, and while four of them either tied the score or gave the Canadiens a lead, only one came in the third period and none in overtime. That singular third-period goal was his last one, a power-play goal that made it 5-1 Carolina in garbage time of Game 5.
But the further context behind Caufield’s comments Monday came from his good friend, Hurricanes defenceman K’Andre Miller, before the start of that Eastern Conference final series. We had a chance to hear Miller and Caufield exchange their love for each other in the post-series handshake line, former teammates at the University of Wisconsin and the United States National Team Development Program.
The day of Game 1 of the series, Miller, who had just become a dad for the first time, was asked about how that relationship with Caufield grew at Wisconsin.
“We would usually be some of the two last guys at the rink,” Miller said. “I think he taught me so much. He didn’t really realize it, but he was so mature for his age. He just came in and always had a smile on his face and always had that willingness to get better. So I think that just kind of motivated the room and everybody kind of followed along.”
Mature is not usually the first word that comes to mind when describing Caufield. In fact, he is known as a constant talker, a constant joker. Miller’s choice of that word to describe his friend merited further questioning.
“I’ve known Cole since my U-17 year when he had all the hype around him, this kid, he’s coming in and he’s going to be the next U-17 stud,” Miller explained. “I think anybody who has that type of pressure on him, hype, whatever you want to call it, I think they’re always going to have that little birdie in the back of their ear: I need to perform, I need to be better. He was willing to put in that work; he was willing to do whatever it took to take that next step. Obviously everybody talks about his size, but I don’t think it’s really the size of the dog; it’s the size of the fight.
“I think he does a great job of keeping that noise out of his head and just bringing that work ethic every day.”
A few days later, that was not exactly true. The noise had indeed gotten into Caufield’s head, and not just his.
Caufield’s line with Suzuki and Juraj Slafkovský was one of the most dangerous in the league at five-on-five in the regular season, eighth in the league among lines that spent at least 400 minutes on the ice together in five-on-five expected goals for percentage, and first in the league in actual goals for percentage at 70.2 percent, according to MoneyPuck.com.
The line was a plus-19 at five-on-five in the regular season and was a minus-8 at five-on-five in the playoffs. No forward line in the playoffs has been on the ice for more than the 11 goals that line allowed for the Canadiens, and it’s not particularly close.
“I think once in the playoffs, all three of us were not loving what was going on and what our games were feeling like,” Suzuki said. “At points I thought we had it, and then something wouldn’t go our way.”
Lane Hutson mentioned after the Canadiens’ final game and also Monday how his team was unable to elevate with each successive playoff series. The conference final called for it, and the Canadiens had no elevation left.
But that is where Caufield’s harsh assessment of his own game comes in, and where the overall performance of his line comes in.
Because yes, the Canadiens needed more from the top line, which had carried them all season, but it’s not as if Caufield entered the playoffs wanting to suck, or that his linemates entered each playoff game saying they would give less than everything they have.
So where exactly does that elevation come from?
“It’s honestly more on the mental side, I feel like,” Suzuki said. “When you’re in a playoff series, you’re going up against the same guys over and over again. I think you’ve got to find the mental edge, whether it’s learning their tendencies, learning how they want to play as an individual player and as a team. I think you can gain that edge mentally, which elevates your chances of producing a lot.”
Slafkovský, when asked what percentage of the playoff grind is mental or physical, put it at 65 percent mental and 35 percent physical. Considering just about everyone thought Slafkovský was playing injured — something he denied — that is telling.
“We all wanted more out of us,” he said. “Some games I almost felt we were trying to do too much, and it worked less because of that. That’s how it is. You don’t have a lot of time to think during that, because you can’t get mad over one game. It was kind of a roller coaster, which I don’t like. You always want to go up with your performance.
“But like I said, 100 percent it could have been better, but it made us better for next year again.”
Suzuki might have summed it up best, perhaps unknowingly, as to why his line couldn’t deliver at the level it wanted to.
“I think we definitely could have done a little bit more to help the team win,” he said. “It’s obviously the pressure that we carry for most nights.”
Canadiens president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton mentioned Monday how they ask a lot of their top line, and that pressure they carry most nights might have simply become too much for them to handle. In the playoffs, the Suzuki line got a ton of support. Of the 34 playoff goals the Canadiens scored at five-on-five, 19 came from Alex Newhook (six), Josh Anderson (five), Alexandre Texier (four) and Kirby Dach (four).
Suzuki, Caufield and Slafkovský combined for four.
And as the struggles at five-on-five continued, both offensively and defensively, it became a bigger and bigger talking point, which in turn made it a bigger and bigger challenge to fight through it.
That, in large part, was a mental challenge.
When you produce 100 points as Suzuki did this season, or you score 50 goals as Caufield did or 30 goals as Slafkovský did, your name will be circled on the opposing team’s board. You will be a defensive priority for the opponent. And you will be that priority against its best defencemen and best forwards.
When Caufield scored his four goals in the 2021 third round, he was not necessarily a guy who was circled.
“Obviously Cole and Slaf have always been kind of a go-to guy in big tournaments and team stuff growing up, and I’ve definitely had my fair share of being targeted,” Suzuki said. “I feel like you’ve just got to find a way to deal with it mentally. Guys are going to be physical on you more so than others, if you can mentally sustain that, I feel like it’s still the same game.
“We can probably do a better job of that in the playoffs.”
Miller’s recollection of Caufield’s mental maturity as a teenager, Slafkovský’s ability to elevate on every international stage he has played on and Suzuki’s and Slafkovský’s performance at the Olympics in February suggest the mental capacity to elevate is in each of them.
But the playoffs are not a few games of mental strength. It is months of it.
“They know their system inside out,” Suzuki said of the Hurricanes. “Marty talks about mental stamina, and they have plenty of it.”
Martin St. Louis would know, because he, too, had plenty of it as a player. Anyone who could help lead his team back from a 3-1 series deficit mere days after the sudden death of his mother, as St. Louis did for the New York Rangers against the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2014, would be a leading expert on the subject of mental stamina.
The thing about stamina, however, is that it takes time to develop. You don’t just decide to start a running regimen and immediately run a marathon; you build up to it with shorter runs. The Canadiens began that process last season with five playoff games and jumped straight to 19 this season, essentially the equivalent of going straight from a 5-kilometre run to a half-marathon.
It was a bit too much for some of the Canadiens’ top players to handle, but it should help them handle it in the future.
“It’s not going to be always the way you want it to be, or the way I want it to be,” Slafkovský said of what he learned in the playoffs. “But sometimes you’ve got to try less and play a little smarter and simpler. So I would say sometimes, when it’s not going my way, I should be more simple in what I do. … I think we need to add experience, and we got it these playoffs.
“So I’m 100 percent sure that next playoffs will be even better for us.”
Fast forward to Suzuki talking about winning the Selke Trophy on Friday, and how he would describe his biggest improvement as a defensive player.
“I think just past experiences through previous seasons and going through failures or misreads or plays that you’d want back, I think you just learn from those experiences and try to put them into your game again when those plays and times come back,” Suzuki said. “There’s a lot of different players in the league that you just get used to knowing, reads and different things like that, and teams, how they try to focus on doing things.
“So I think just learning through the league and putting it into my game has probably been my biggest growth.”
He is talking about his defensive game, but everything Suzuki said would apply to his team’s initiation into playoff hockey. There were very few experiences for the Canadiens generally — and Suzuki, Caufield and Slafkovský specifically — to draw upon when things got tough in the playoffs. No muscle memory. No mental memory. Essentially, from Game 6 of the first round onward, the Canadiens were learning as they went.
In other words, they had not gone through the necessary training to run that half-marathon, and there is a recognition that work remains to prepare for that full marathon.
But at the very least, their improved stamina should allow them to run a bit farther and faster next time.
