MONTREAL — In a game the Montreal Canadiens lost by one goal, it would be easy to suggest the puck bouncing off the stanchion by the Bell Centre’s Zamboni door before caroming off Jakub Dobes’ pad was the difference.
But there was more to why the Canadiens finished Tuesday night down 3-2 in the game and tied 2-2 in their series with the Buffalo Sabres, and they’ll have to properly evaluate that before the action resumes at KeyBank Center on Thursday.
For a team that prides itself on honest self-assessment, a reality check awaits in the video room.
The Canadiens had seven power plays but scored on only one. And even if Cole Caufield, who scored that goal and said afterward that he and his teammates broke down the Sabres “a bunch” and were only thwarted by great saves Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, they mismanaged the puck enough to squander those other six opportunities.
The one that hurt most came with 1:29 to go in the second period, 11:31 after Tage Thompson shot that puck off the glass and into the net to tie the game 2-2. It was the last power play the Canadiens got in the game — a four-minute chance that bled into the third period because Bowen Byram cut Alexandre Texier with a high stick — and they generated just two shots on net over that time.
Both came from over 28 feet out, which wasn’t close enough.
“It’s a fine line (between winning and losing),” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis.
He’s been talking about the difference all season long and almost always attributing it to committing enough actions to stack the odds in your favour without any guarantees the outcome will fall that way.
While St. Louis and the Canadiens have reason to believe they did that, they know it wasn’t just a bounce off the stanchion that swung the outcome the Sabres’ way.
“Obviously, the first 10 (minutes) was not good,” said Jake Evans, and that was sugarcoating it.
The Canadiens got trampled out of the gate and found themselves trailing 6:32 in, and that was disappointing to all of them.
“I felt we didn’t manage the puck well in the o-zone,” St. Louis said. “I felt we had numbers back to deal with the rush game and we just didn’t execute.”
That’s what happened on Mattias Samuelsson’s opening goal, where Zachary Bolduc was in position to better defend Josh Norris before Norris passed across to Samuelsson, who slipped by Joe Veleno’s check to the back door of Dobes’ crease.
Less than two minutes later, it happened again. Josh Anderson was in good position to stop Jack Quinn and lost him, allowing Quinn to score a goal that was ultimately disallowed after a goaltender interference challenge on Konsta Helenius.
That was a Montreal bounce.
The Sabres forward drove the puck to Dobes’ net and made contact with the goaltender’s stick on his way out of the crease, and it would’ve been totally understandable for the officials — with the help of the NHL hockey operations in the situation room — to deem it didn’t impede Dobes enough from making the save on Quinn. Especially since Dobes did glove the puck on Quinn’s shot, even if he wasn’t able to keep the webbing of his glove from crossing the goal line.
That was a major momentum swing for the Canadiens. Alex Newhook scored two minutes later, and Caufield made it 2-1 Canadiens with 13 seconds to go in the period.
Thompson’s goal off the stanchion seven minutes into the second period wasn’t the difference, though it was a Buffalo bounce to nullify the Montreal one from earlier.
That he only shot it there because his Sabres had failed on three consecutive attempts to break the puck into Montreal’s end in control of the puck on the power play was only part of the luck of that play. The other part was Dobes staying in his net instead of going to play the puck because he had already been burned for a goal off the Zamboni door earlier in the season.
“He got caught leaving his net once, and now he doesn’t go when he sees the puck hit there,” said St. Louis. “Had he gone out this time, I don’t think it would’ve gone in. What do you want?”
What you want is for your team to respond the right way to it, and it’s hard to suggest the Canadiens didn’t.
It’s even debatable they weren’t as desperate as the Sabres to win the game. Especially when you consider how they hounded the puck through the second half and dominated the portion of the third period they spent trying to claw back from down 3-2.
But Evans took a penalty 150 feet from his net and the Canadiens didn’t execute well enough to stop Zach Benson from having enough time in the slot to push the puck from forehand to backhand for what proved to be the winning goal on the ensuing power play.
That’s a sequence the Canadiens will lament until moving on to prepare for Thursday’s Game 5.
Meanwhile, the Sabres will gain confidence from how they handled the Canadiens’ onslaught. Considering how poorly they defended to allow 11 goals over Games 2 and 3, that was a marked improvement.
They blocked 13 shots over the final 15:19, and that was after they’d blocked 20 in the leadup to Benson’s goal.
The Sabres also forced 15 Montreal’s shots wide, and they’ll take confidence from Luukkonen entering the series cold and stopping 28 of the 30 shots that got to his net.
Considering it was the 27-year-old’s first start since April 21, and considering the pressure he was under to wrestle back home-ice advantage for the Sabres, he was excellent.
It was a bold call by Sabres coach Lindy Ruff to put Luukkonen in for Alex Lyon, and it paid off.
“He’s been a great teammate,” Ruff said. “He’s the guy that sits there and is pushing the other guy to play well and has worked extremely hard knowing that his chance was going to come. And I even talked to him probably five, six days ago about, ‘Your time will come, and you know you’ve got to be ready…’”
Between Games 3 and 4, St. Louis talked to the Canadiens about being ready and being alert knowing the Sabres would strike with their best punch of the series after major whiffs over the last two games.
His team didn’t respond immediately, and it couldn’t find a way through late.
Now the Canadiens find themselves in the same spot they were in last round, after having lost Game 4 and a chance to go back on the road up 3-1.
At least they’re not in foreign territory. At least they beat the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 5 before closing them out in Game 7.
“You can draw a lot (from the experience),” said Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki. “We knew we had to go to Buffalo anyways. We’re a good road team. We’ve shown that all year. So, we’ve gotta go do it again and bring it back home.”
The first task is to process what went wrong Tuesday. Evaluate the poor start, review the missed chances, and don’t just accept that a bad bounce was the difference.
That should fuel the same resolve that’s allowed the Canadiens to respond to every one of their losses in the playoffs with wins.