The Montreal Canadiens didn’t go looking for a coaching shakeup this week, but they ended up with one anyway - and maybe, just maybe, the timing works out better than anyone expected.
Trevor Letowski stepped down as assistant coach after five seasons on Martin St. Louis’s staff, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. Montreal moved quickly to replace him, bringing in Derek Lalonde, who had just been let go by the Toronto Maple Leafs.
That swap changes the shape of the Canadiens’ bench in a meaningful way. Letowski was valued in Montreal for plenty of reasons, especially the way he connected with players.
His five years with the club followed a long run in the Ontario Hockey League, first with the Sarnia Sting and then the Windsor Spitfires, and his route to the NHL included a Memorial Cup as an associate coach in 2017 and a gold medal at the 2018 World Junior Championships while working alongside Dominique Ducharme. When he got to Montreal in 2021, he talked about the job in terms of keeping young players like Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki comfortable through the grind of a season.
That was always part of his value.
But the Canadiens also had a clear hockey problem, and it’s the kind that doesn’t get solved by good vibes alone. Their penalty kill was a trouble spot for most of last season, even if it improved late in the regular season and into the playoffs.
Montreal’s defensive structure and special teams have been the softest parts of the roster, and the organization has built enough elsewhere under St. Louis to make that gap stand out even more.
The young core is real, and the blue line is led by Lane Hutson, but the staff still needed someone whose reputation was built on systems, structure and defensive detail.
That’s where Lalonde fits.
He arrives with more than 30 years of coaching experience and a résumé that points straight at the areas Montreal wants fixed. His best-known run came with the Tampa Bay Lightning, where he spent four seasons as an assistant from 2018 to 2022 and helped the club win back-to-back Stanley Cups. He worked under Jon Cooper on a staff that turned a talent-rich team into a machine, and his role centered on the defensive and special-teams side of the operation.
That background matters for Montreal. The Canadiens weren’t shopping for a coach with that exact profile when the week started, but Letowski’s departure opened the door, and Lalonde happened to be available. The fit is obvious on paper: a staff that already has the offensive side in motion now adds someone with a track record in the area the team needs most.
Lalonde’s most recent stop only reinforced that reputation. In Toronto last season, he helped guide a Maple Leafs penalty kill that finished in the top ten in the league. Before that, he spent two and a half seasons as head coach in Detroit, where the results were mixed, but even there he came in focused on fixing team defense and special teams.
He’s also expected to have a bigger title in Montreal than a standard assistant. Reports from Montreal describe him as St. Louis’s lead assistant, with responsibility for the defensive system and the ability to take over behind the bench if the head coach is unavailable for a game.
None of that erases what Letowski meant to the Canadiens. He was described this week as extremely well-respected inside the organization, and Montreal’s desire to keep him around in some form says plenty about the role he played.
But the business of building a staff is never just about replacing one person with another. Sometimes an unexpected opening lands right on top of a need a team already knew it had.
For Montreal, that need is clear: tighten the structure, clean up the special teams, and stop giving away the kinds of chances that can unravel a game against top competition. Lalonde’s résumé says he’s built for that job.
Now the Canadiens have to see how quickly he and St. Louis can make it work.
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