TAMPA, Fla. — A dose of perspective, 48 hours after yet another game in which Montreal’s best players were held to nil at five-on-five: the Bell Centre’s opening up with the Canadiens tied 1-1 in their series with the Tampa Bay Lightning, and matchups shift in coach Martin St. Louis’ favour.
“It’s a line that can dominate five-on-five,” the Canadiens’ coach said after Game 2 was lost 3-2 in overtime. “They just haven’t yet.”
“Yet” was the operative word.
There’s plenty of reason to believe it’s coming now.
Chief among them is that these players, who played over 500 minutes together this season, had the fifth-best expected goals share (54.2 per cent) and fifth-most goals (33) of any in the league to spend as much time together.
Two games hard-matched against three of the best two-way players in the world (Brandon Hagel, Anthony Cirelli and Jake Guentzel) won’t define their playoffs, especially with home ice advantage in their corner. And Suzuki (three assists), Caufield (three assists) and Slafkovsky (three goals) will still have plenty of confidence from what they did on the power play in those two games.
The Canadiens should take plenty of it, too, considering what they were able to achieve without their top line carrying them at five-on-five. Through seven of eight periods so far, the numbers — expected goals, high-danger chances, slot-driving plays, scoring chances off the cycle, scoring chances off turnovers, controlled entries and exits, and puck battles won — have tilted heavily in their favour, according to SportLogiq.
It’s certainly lent credence to St. Louis’ feeling that the Canadiens have performed as he’d hoped they would.
Even if Game 2 was decided by his team’s worst period and Tampa’s very best.
“We battled hard, we competed,” said St. Louis. “Controlled a lot of the game yesterday, just lost it. But it’s there. Very confident in how we want to play it and the thoughts behind our intention and the courage that we’ve shown.”
But not so confident that he should avoid making changes…
That is the name of the game in the playoffs, and St. Louis’ counterpart, Jon Cooper, knows it.
His Lightning lost Game 1, so he swapped Connor Geekie for Scott Sabourin for Game 2.
It’s a move that could’ve backfired — and it almost did, with Sabourin taking an inexcusable penalty on Josh Anderson when the game was tied 2-2 with 2:15 remaining in the third period.
Cooper acknowledged that when he said, “For 58 minutes (Sabourin) kind of held it together.”
But the coach was willing to risk it going wrong to change up the momentum lost in Game 1, and that was commendable.
“Sabby has a definite role on this team,” Cooper said. “He finds his way on the scoresheet, just in different sections of it. The team plays a bit bigger when he’s in the lineup. He knows his role, he’s exceptional on the bench.”
We’ll see if Sabourin can be exceptional on the ice in Game 3, or if more adjustments must be made in Montreal.
Sometimes they’re necessary even after a win.
They usually must come after a loss in the playoffs, and St. Louis has to be contemplating that as we speak. Even if he (justifiably) liked his team’s play through the first two games.
Two of his forwards, who sat for both, also have clear roles with the Canadiens, and both have proven they can help.
Joe Veleno played excellent two-way hockey down the stretch and was one of Montreal’s most physical players this season, finishing with the third-most hits on the team despite playing only 61 games. And Brendan Gallagher has played nearly five times as many playoff games as the two players he and Veleno would likely draw in for.
Oliver Kapanen is one, and Kirby Dach is the most likely one.
Even if St. Louis defended Dach’s play on Wednesday.
“I find Dacher’s bringing physicality,” said St. Louis 10 hours after Dach shied away from a hit and needlessly iced the puck before totally misplaying J.J. Moser on the overtime winning goal.
“I’ll rewatch the game,” St. Louis continued, “but with his intentions the last couple of weeks, he’s playing with a lot of combativeness.”
It was good to hear him say it, especially in the wake of the player being subjected to so much post-game vitriol that he decided to deactivate his personal Instagram account.
“It’s one play,” St. Louis added, and even if it was more accurately one sequence, he’s justified to feel it didn’t cancel out all the good Dach had done since returning from injury two weeks ago.
Beyond those two weeks, the objective viewer would notice that Dach’s intentions have been admirable since the start of the season. He’s played hard but been unfortunate, suffering injuries — a broken bone near his ankle after blocking a shot with the same foot he blocked a shot with the game before, and an upper-body injury suffered on a heavy, questionable hit — because he put his body on the line to make plays the Canadiens needed.
That’s something that won’t be acknowledged by people who’ve already developed a bias against Dach for his shortcomings in the past, which were partially due to some immaturity and mostly due to devastating injuries suffered right as he was gaining some positive momentum.
But St. Louis also can’t ignore some of the inconsistencies in Dach’s play through the last five games of the regular season, and he can’t turn a blind eye to why he wasn’t able to execute in those critical moments of Game 2.
If he comes back to Dach and Kapanen in Game 3, it’ll be because they — along with Zach Bolduc — have controlled 83.3 per cent of the expected goals.
Still, that figure must be balanced with usage (only 13:10 at five-on-five through two games) and the reality that those players could potentially play against different opponents in Montreal.
The upside of both Dach and Kapanen must also be weighed against the improbability that they’ll deliver at the height of their abilities versus the likelihood that Veleno and Gallagher will.
Because those two players are far more predictable, even if their upside isn’t as high.
Veleno can help on the penalty kill, too, where Kapanen was used sparingly in Game 1 before being parked completely in Game 2.
Perhaps St. Louis will see Kapanen as a better option with Ivan Demidov and Alex Newhook than Alex Texier.
We won’t know before Thursday. Heck, we likely won’t know before warmup of Friday’s Game 3.
• Can’t help but wonder if one change St. Louis will make will be moving Jake Evans to centre, even if his line with Anderson and Phillip Danault has been excellent. If Veleno comes in, he can easily slot in on Danault’s wing without affecting the efficiency of the line. Control of the matchup also gives St. Louis much more flexibility to spot Evans in with Danault here and there for right-side defensive zone faceoffs.
• Two years ago, Canadiens fans would’ve traded Josh Anderson for a bag of pucks. After two games of watching him play again in the playoffs, they’ll be begging GM Kent Hughes to give him a bag of money. Anderson’s contract, which pays him $5.5 million, expires at the end of next season. But no matter how next season goes for him, his playoff performance is worth whatever he’ll get for it.
You think of the 2021 Canadiens Cup run, of the 2025 post-season dust-ups with Tom Wilson, and of Anderson’s immediate impact on this series with the Lightning, and you know his value. There aren’t as many as 10 other players in the league who play the way he does when it’s all on the line. And based on how he’s skating, we shouldn’t expect him to play any differently after he turns 33 in May of 2027.
• “I think somebody’s got to be the villain, I guess, and we’re OK with it,” said Cooper after Game 2. Just a thought, but if the Lightning think it’s why they won, that could be an advantage for the Canadiens, who dominated the first two periods while the Lightning ran around — and mostly ran straight into the penalty box.
• Counterpoint: As Hagel said, “Everyone in the room knows we’re good when we play with emotion,” so there’s that. Hagel has also said several times that the Lightning are anticipating a long series, and he and the Lightning know a thing or two about what goes into winning a war of attrition.
• Suzuki didn’t have an issue with Slafkovsky fighting Hagel in Game 2. It was a calculated — and arguably wise — decision from Slafkovsky, considering Hagel was Tampa’s best player by a country mile up until that point.
But Slafkovsky took a heavy punch at the end of that fight, and it was hard not to consider its impact beyond the probable bruising that’ll develop.
Was it already felt when Slafkovsky seemingly threw a blind pass for the giveaway that led to Nikita Kucherov’s tying goal in the third period because he was trying to avoid a hit? It felt that way, but we’ll never know.
The Lightning won’t know, either, but they probably felt that way about it. And if they did, it would probably only have them leaning further into the rough stuff.
We thought, for the first time in the series, the Lightning were at their best when they finally got away from that and started playing hockey.
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