What has gone wrong for Habs rookie Cole Caufield?

Entering the season as the betting favorite to win the Calder Memorial Trophy as the league’s rookie of the year, Cole Caufield’s start to his first full campaign with the Montreal Canadiens has been anything but Calder worthy. With just one assist through his first 10 games this season, an expected source of production has gone cold, not unlike most of the rest of the Habs’ offense. As a result, Montreal sent Caufield to the AHL’s Laval Rocket on Monday.

Though the rookie is down in the AHL, presumably to rebuild some confidence after his rocky start to the season, I wanted to take a look at his first 10 games with the Habs to see what exactly what has gone wrong for the undersized sniper.

With the help of InStat, I looked at seven games worth of footage Caufield played over the course of the season, tracking each of his shifts, puck touches and combining the eye test with the analytics and some self-tracked micro-stats. In the end, the picture painted isn’t necessarily bad, all things considered, but he’s heading to the AHL for a reason.

What do the numbers say?

First off, let’s take the 10,000-foot look at Caufield and his stats. The 20-year-old rookie has appeared in each of Montreal’s first 10 games. He has just one assist, with 22 shots on goal, 42 total attempts and averages 14:11 of time on ice. At 5-on-5 with Caufield on the ice, the Habs are even in shot attempt differential, have three more scoring chances than they’ve allowed and have been outscored 4-1.

To be fair to Caufield, he hasn’t been great, but he has not been bad, either. If there’s anything you can say about his ice time, not a ton has happened for either side when he’s out there at 5-on-5.

Looking back at his postseason, where he produced 12 points over 20 games, including four goals and eight assists, his underlying numbers weren’t drastically better than what he’s shown this season. Caufield has played at least close to the same level overall without the same results in 2021-22.

Is usage a factor?

In short, no.

Caufield has been used primarily like a top six forward. He’s been given opportunities, ranking sixth among forwards in five-on-five time on ice and was on the first power play unit for much of his NHL time, with the fourth highest minutes on the advantage on the entire roster. He does not kill penalties and has seen his ice time dwindle as his effectiveness has waned. At all strengths, over 80% of his shifts start in the offensive zone.

They’ve been trying to put him in situations to have some success. Caufield has played with good linemates, starting the season with that brilliant playoff line of Nick Suzuki and Tyler Toffoli. As he’s moved around the lineup, he’s seen a lot of time with Mathieu Perreault, Joel Armia and Brendan Gallagher at 5-on-5.

Caufield isn’t solely responsible for his lack of production. The Habs have the fourth fewest goals per game in the entire NHL and their power play is sixth-worst. Montreal suffered so many losses from its postseason roster that they’re still trying to find a way forward as an entire group.

Caufield’s postseason performance and how well he played in college last season only raised the pressure and expectation that he’d pick up some of the scoring slack even as a first-year full-timer. It simply has not happened to this point. But then again, no one is scoring for the Habs right now.

So why hasn’t Caufield been scoring?

I don’t know if Cole Caufield has ever gone 10 games without a goal in his life. He certainly hasn’t over the last four seasons. This is what I wanted to really look at. How is he actually playing?

After watching seven of his 10 games, shift-by-shift, I counted puck touches and tracked positive and negative plays made. Positive plays include completed passes, zone entries, 50-50 battles won, unblocked shots attempted, scoring chances, etc. Negative plays included giveaways, poor reads, weak backchecks, bad shot selection, 50-50 battles lost, etc. It’s a little more subjective, but I wanted to quantify the eye test a little more just to see what I was able to come up with.

According to my tracking, Caufield averaged about 23 puck touches per game with the high being 32 and the low being 17. Over 164 puck touches, Caufield made 101 positive plays and 44 negative plays, with the rest being negligible plays like dump-ins or clears. So 61.5% of his touches over those seven games resulted in positive plays for his team.

He still has confidence on the puck and handles it really smoothly. On top of that, Caufield makes a lot high-percentage plays, like short passes and shots from below the tops of the faceoff circles.

The bad news, though, is that he hasn’t really had the puck enough to make a strong impact on the game one way or the other. Caufield’s shifts have been relatively low-event hockey with neither side trading a ton of scoring chances. Eight total goals have been scored by either team in Caufield’s 141:51 of ice time, only three for Montreal.

The knock on Caufield during his draft year, beyond his size, was if he wasn’t going to score for you, what is he going to do? The answer early this season has been not much. Caufield didn’t have a ton of puck battles, but in some games, he didn’t even contest pucks. It wasn’t a lack of effort thing, because all signs point to him putting forth a consistent effort. He just wasn’t winning foot races to loose pucks and 50-50 puck battles were largely going the other way as bigger players were able to be stronger and harder on pucks than was physically possible for the 5-foot-7 Caufield. As Caufield builds strength, he should be better in that particular area, even if it may never be a strong point in his game.

Despite that, Caufield has limited mistakes. Sometimes he’d take the wrong route to a puck or try to force a pass that wasn’t there. He largely was connecting on passes and shots, back-checking and playing sound positionally, but he hasn’t looked himself in one critical way.

Having tracked Caufield for the last four years, so much of his offensive generation and goal-scoring prowess doesn’t come from his elite release. It comes from his elite timing. At lower levels, Caufield always found a way to pop into space at just the right time. Defenders would lose him, or he’d just anticipate the way a play would unfold and present himself as an option at just the right time.

This season, that time and space just hasn’t been there or he hasn’t been able to adjust adequately yet. Caufield has rarely been a viable option in a high-danger area. He hasn’t been getting open with clean shooting lane. There have been a few good looks on power plays, but only a few. This season, he has been credited with only four individual high-danger scoring chances for at all strengths.

Eventually in his career, the Wisconsin native is going to be able to generate a lot of his own scoring chances. But at this point, he probably needs a viable playmaker to get him the puck a bit more. Jonathan Drouin, the most consistent Hab, is the only one that really fits that description this season, but you don’t want to take him away from the one line that seems to be working for Montreal.

Was sending him down the right call?

Sending Caufield to Laval isn’t the most popular decision, but even the most favorable deployment isn’t working at the NHL right now. Goal scorers thrive on confidence. After watching Caufield’s last game against Anaheim when he played a season low 11:00, that confidence has been eroding slowly as the team struggles.

In the only two AHL games Caufield played last season, he had two goals and an assist. If he can go down to Laval, get into some games and get into a rhythm, that could help him set the reset button. I don’t think the Habs are going to want him to stay down there for too long, though, especially when he still needs to figure out NHL timing. As long as Caufield can put the work in, maybe break the scoring drought, and get big minutes, tapping the brakes and letting him get away from the spotlight in Montreal and get back to what works for him while playing in the AHL could be the best to get his season back on track.

Reason for optimism

Alex DeBrincat has long been a comparable for Caufield due to their similar size and style of play. In DeBrincat’s own rookie season, after absolutely torching the OHL in three prior campaigns, he put up four points and just one goal, over his first 10 games. He had a little more production, but found himself with fluctuating ice time and relatively poor defensive metrics all while being surrounded by a much better lineup than the one Caufield currently has.

Despite the slow start, DeBrincat’s game grew throughout the season. His timing improved and he scored 27 more goals over the course of that season while improving all of his underlying numbers as well. The following season, DeBrincat scored 41 goals. The high-end goal scorers almost always find a way.

In his previous four seasons combined, Cole Caufield scored 165 goals in 171 games. In his first Stanley Cup Playoffs, he had four goals and 12 points in 20 games. These 10 games, while disappointing, they’re still just 10 games. If this was a 10-game stretch in January, it would barely be a story, but since they’re the only 10 games we’ve got, the spotlight shines bright. Either way, these last 10 games do very little to sway my belief that Caufield is going to be a special player in this league even if I agree that sending him down may be the best call for now.

All statistics via naturalstattrick.com and hockey-reference.com.