The Canadiens are going to start the season with their highest-paid forward playing on the fourth line.

Patrik Laine will also have Joe Veleno waiting in the wings to take his spot if things don’t go well.

Head coach Martin St. Louis maintains that he has a No. 1 line — with Nick Suzuki playing between Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky — and three other lines that aren’t really numbered.

But Laine — who has a US$8.7 million salary-cap hit in the final year of his contract — started training camp on what looked like the second line with centre Kirby Dach and Ivan Demidov and found himself on a line with Jake Evans and Josh Anderson Monday when the Canadiens practised in Brossard ahead of Wednesday’s season opener in Toronto against the Maple Leafs (7 p.m., SN, TVA Sports).

The other two lines had Oliver Kapanen between Alex Newhook and Demidov, and Dach between Zachary Bolduc and Brendan Gallagher with Veleno as the extra forward.

St. Louis noted that he has to write the lines down on the board in the locker room and that when practice starts, the lines come one after another following Suzuki’s line, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are the second, third and fourth lines. The coach said it’s important in today’s NHL to come in waves, with roles distributed throughout the four lines and that the most important thing is having all four lines play five-on-five hockey at both ends of the ice.

Five-on-five hockey was a problem for Laine last season after the Canadiens — who were desperate to find more offence — acquired him from the Columbus Blue Jackets, along with a second-round pick at the 2026 NHL Draft, in exchange for defenceman Jordan Harris. After recovering from a sprained knee suffered in a pre-season game, Laine started off like the younger version of himself that scored a career-high 44 goals with the Winnipeg Jets in 2017-18 as a 19-year-old after being the No. 2 overall pick at the 2016 NHL Draft.

Laine scored eight goals in his first nine games last season — all on the power play. He finished the season with 20 goals in 52 games, including 15 on the power play. The Canadiens wouldn’t have made the playoffs without Laine, as GM Kent Hughes noted at the end of the season.

But Laine also had a minus-14 differential and was limited to less than 12 minutes of ice time in four of the last six regular-season games — scoring one goal at even strength — as the Canadiens battled to earn the last playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.

The 27-year-old Laine worked hard this summer, skating almost every day in Brossard, to get ready for training camp. He worked hard throughout camp, but also looked slow compared with his teammates. St. Louis wants his team to play a fast-paced game while defending hard in the offensive and neutral zones so they don’t have to defend so much in their own zone. That doesn’t play to Laine’s strengths.

But St. Louis said he liked what he saw from Laine in the last two pre-season games.

“His five-on-five play is the best I’ve seen,” St. Louis said in a scrum with reporters outside the Canadiens’ locker room after Monday’s practice. “We talk about this a lot, guys. How many minutes of special teams are you going to have in a game? Let’s just pretend there’s three (penalties) on each side — that’s 12 minutes. There’s 48 minutes of even-strength hockey that we got to play and that’s got to be the main focus.

“Are the special teams important? Absolutely,” St. Louis added. “But that 48 out of 60 — 85 per cent of the game — is going to be played even strength. What do you do on the ice to raise the percentages for our team to be successful? And it’s not necessarily actions on the puck, they’re actions off the puck on both sides of the game. For me, what I saw from Patty the last two games, I’m very encouraged because I want to be able to come in waves and if Patty plays like that, it makes us deeper. And then, obviously, he can take his shots on the PP, which we need. So I’m very encouraged.”

Suzuki is the second-highest paid forward on the Canadiens with a salary-cap hit of US$7.875 million. The highest-paid player is new defenceman Noah Dobson, with a salary-cap hit of US$9.5 million.

Suzuki likes what he saw from Laine at training camp.

“He had a really good summer,” the captain said. “I was skating with him and I think he knows what the coaches expect from him. He’s been good on the power play. I think getting better five-on-five. He’s played with a few different guys. I think Jake and Andy are kind of helping him out defensively, which is nice.

“I think he wants to be here, he wants it bad,” Suzuki added. “I think he’s just trying to do the little details over and over again to be successful and I think we’ve seen that.”

We’ll see if Laine can continue to do that during the regular season.

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