St. Louis is the right coach for Canadiens right now

It’s the time of year when sports media types make predictions — meaning that you toss something out there and if you’re right, you boast about it. If you’re wrong, you stay mum.

This year, I’m making only one prediction: every Canadiens player who deals with Martin St. Louis will be the better for it — especially the younger ones.

The players won’t be bullied, they’ll be taught. They won’t be called into the coach’s office for a ritual humiliation with the cameras rolling, they’ll be encouraged with a quiet word and a pat on the back. They’ll be given tools, not hit over the head with tools.

It’s going to be a tough season for the Habs at times. A crew of talented young defencemen will be trying to make the leap to the NHL at once, without Carey Price to mop up the mistakes. There will be winning streaks, and losing streaks, and times when St. Louis will need every bit of fire and ingenuity he can muster to turn things around.

At season’s end, I suspect, the Canadiens will be around the playoff bubble, give or take an injury or two. That amounts to a prediction of sorts, but it doesn’t matter — in the long run, they would probably be better off with one of the top three picks in the powerful 2023 draft. What matters is that a coach with wisdom far beyond his coaching experience will be developing players the way they should be developed.

With the exception of Dominique Ducharme, I’ve interacted in some way with every Habs coach going back to Pat Burns — and you can toss in Scotty Bowman, as well. With experienced coaches, you’re dealing with the cliché machine that reduces every comment to “we can’t get too high or too low.” Of course they think about the game, but real insights are rare to nonexistent, especially when the cameras are rolling.

Bowman aside, however, in the course of one training camp I have heard more coaching wisdom and insight from Martin St. Louis than you would get from Michel Therrien in five years. Some samples, gleaned from my mentor Stu Cowan and others:

“I don’t really coach the players with the puck, I coach the four other players without the puck. The puck, that’s the present. The four other players, that’s the future.”

“If you expect immediate understanding and execution, you don’t understand what teaching is.”

“I don’t care about the floor. I really don’t when they’re young. Show me your ceiling — we’ll fix the floor.”

“The most important day in this league is the next day. Whether you win or lose, how do you attack the next day? I understood that (as a player) but I think I realize even more now how important that next day is.”

In case you hadn’t worked it out already, St. Louis is special. He was a special athlete and he is a special coach.

That has nothing to do with how many hockey games the guy is going to win. Maybe he wins 1,000 and breaks the Canadiens’ Stanley Cup drought. Maybe he doesn’t win another game.

Either way, he’s the guy I want behind this bench, at this time, coaching this team. For Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes, the decision to hand the reins to this individual with essentially no experience was brilliant, no matter how it works out in terms of wins and losses.