Canadiens’ quick study on Hurricanes leads to dominant Game 1 win

RALEIGH, N.C. — What we learned about the Montreal Canadiens in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Final is they’re a quick study. 

It’s not like the Canadiens had all the time in the world to prepare for this series against the Carolina Hurricanes. They barely had 72 hours after winning Game 7 in Buffalo, and at least six of those were spent travelling, while another 21, give or take, were spent sleeping.

Captain Nick Suzuki said the Canadiens had a long meeting Wednesday, one more Thursday morning, and one last one before Thursday’s game to absorb all the intelligence their coaching staff had gathered. 

To see him and his teammates apply everything they learned to near perfection in a 6-2 win to open this series was yet another example of how they’ve defied their age.

“It shows the maturity of our team,” said elder statesman Phillip Danault, who’s played the second-most playoff games of anyone on the Canadiens.

He’s 33, but most of his teammates are between 20 and 26, with the last 14 games of these playoffs the most formative ones of their blossoming careers.

The lessons they learned over those two weeks came at a breakneck pace. And while they were guaranteed to have value in the long run, you couldn’t help but wonder if they could be applied as quickly as the Canadiens would need them to be.

If they couldn’t pull from that new knowledge base immediately after playing two seven-game series against the Tampa Bay Lightning and Buffalo Sabres, they’d have had little chance of handing the Hurricanes their first loss of these playoffs.

Not even Martin St. Louis was sure the Canadiens could do it immediately.

The coach said earlier on Thursday he “thought” they understood just how hard they needed to defend to win games at this time of year. 

“I think we’ve learned that, yes, we’re gonna lose momentum, but we can’t get hurt so much, we can’t break,” St. Louis added. “We’re gonna bend, but we can’t break. I think we’ve done a good job of that. I think we’ve learned how important (it is) that we’ve gotta keep playing. Whether we’re up a goal, two goals, you’ve gotta keep playing, and it’s a hard thing to do when you’re playing against really good teams, in the sense that they bring their game, too. And sometimes the situation can overwhelm you, and you’ve just got to grab a hold of it and have poise and be confident that you can flip it again and go get that momentum…”

St. Louis must have known for sure after this game at the Lenovo Center.

It started on the wrong foot, with Mike Matheson buckling under the Hurricanes’ pressure and firing a puck up the wall of his own zone that Andrei Svechnikov picked off and fed to Seth Jarvis for the goal that made it 1-0 for the home team 33 seconds in. 

It was one of the last times the Canadiens used the wall of their own zone in a period that ended with them up 4-1.

Part of the scouting work the coaches had done on Carolina, which started 12 days ago — after the Hurricanes had swept the Philadelphia Flyers — had focused on that, and it was unquestionably one of the few points of emphasis St. Louis and his staff drove home to the Canadiens before they exited their zone in control of the puck 92.9 per cent of the time through that opening period.

“You’ve gotta be careful trying to give so much information to players at a time,” St. Louis said. “You’ve gotta pick a couple things and trying to address that, and that’s what we did.”

When the Hurricanes pushed back in Period 2, the Canadiens bent without breaking, still managing to exit cleanly 56 per cent of the time while continuing to generate enough rush chances to extend their lead.

Cole Caufield, who scored 27 seconds after Jarvis to tie the game in the first, hit the post on one of those early second-period rushes before Eric Robinson countered to cut Montreal’s lead to 4-2.

But even if the Canadiens mismanaged the puck in the neutral zone through the rest of the second period, they managed the chaos the Hurricanes brought in their own zone.

“I thought we defended really well,” said St. Louis.

“We weathered the storm,” said Danault.

The Canadiens then throttled down in the third period, with Juraj Slafkovsky bookending perfectly-calculated plays from his team through the final 13 minutes with goals that put the game out of reach. They held the shoot-from-everywhere Hurricanes to one shot on net.

“They made some nice plays, give them credit. They finished,” said coach Rod Brind’Amour. “But I didn’t think we were very sharp, to put it bluntly. Our top guys had a tough night, and that’s not going to work this time of year… I think we just toss this game, to be honest. I hate that at this time of year that’s what we’ve gotta do, but there wasn’t much to grab onto there. I think if you get behind early like that, it’s tough, but we clearly were not ready for that pace. I’m not going to give the (12-day) layoff as an excuse, but we weren’t ready to play playoff hockey and that caught us.”

It took the Canadiens having the right type of engagement off the hop, and they had it for more than one reason.

Of course, one is that they were only three days removed from beating Buffalo and still in possession of that playoff edge. 

But the other was from the lesson they learned in losing Game 1 to Buffalo. The one that wasn’t handed to them by St. Louis and the other Canadiens coaches, like the scouting report on Carolina was.

“It’s probably something I didn’t see,” he said. “The group felt after Game 1 in Buffalo that, emotionally, we weren’t where we needed to be if you compare it to the Tampa series. It’s not something that I personally felt because I’m not in the dressing room for that long. I come in, speak to the team, but I’m not in there. My guess is they handled that because that’s their own perception. They’re in the locker room, they know what they see and feel. My guess is they handled that on their own. As a coach, you don’t have to control everything. You have to lean on your group, your leaders and stuff, and they must have done that.”

Because that’s what a young team that’s come of age does.

These Canadiens, who keep accelerating their own development, took yet another step Thursday. Led by their top line, which had been outscored 10-3 at five-on-five through the first two rounds before combining for two goals at even-strength and one at five-on-six, they studied hard and aced the first test of the third round.

In the process, the Canadiens saddled the Hurricanes with the first adversity they’ve faced in months.

“It was great by everyone,” said Suzuki.

Now class is back in session until Saturday night.

“I think there’s a lot of learning and chatting with each other to figure out what the best plan of action is for Game 2,” said Jake Evans.

If they apply what they learned and discussed, they’ll give themselves a great chance to return to the Bell Centre with a lead in this series.