A lot of things have to go right for a team to overachieve as much as the Habs did this year. Take away any of the following, and the Habs don’t make playoffs:
- having a true first line for the first time in a very long time
- entire line of Gallagher, Anderson and Dvorak having their best seasons in years
- Monty becoming a pretty good #1 goalie with Dobes replacing Primeau as backup
- fewer big injuries than the past few seasons
- addition of Laine’s PP goals and Carrier adequately filling a top-4 D spot
What ties this altogether is the environment that created the conditions for all these players to do so well. Just about every player on this team right played about as well as we could have expected given where they are in their careers plus nagging injuries a few dealt with. A close-knit dressing room was important, but it starts with the boss who in the Habs case also appears to be a great teacher of the mental aspects of the game, something very important for such a young team.
As for Hutson, I agree with you in the sense that he was the biggest difference on this team from last year. The Habs simply didn’t have a player like him before.
Hutson is uber-talented and highly-driven, but also very young and very small, all things that St-Louis once was. St-Louis knew that Hutson would make mistakes and plenty of them from inexperience plus sometimes be outplayed by much larger players, but that didn’t stop him from giving Hutson big minutes from game one, something fairly unprecedented for a rookie D whose strong side isn’t defense.
Good point about mentioning Demidov for next year. Demidov is a very different player partly because he is Russian, but if he can thrive and learn next year as much as Hutson did this year and do so without jeopardizing team results, this team really does start looking like a future cup contender.