Game three of the Stanley Cup semi-finals after the Montreal Canadiens got the split they wanted in Las Vegas. The Bell Centre welcoming an additional 1,000 fans to move to 3,500, after Quebec’s public health agency okayed the increase due to an increasingly COVID-19-free environment in Montreal.
In game three, the Canadiens made their fans happy with a 3-2 overtime win against the Golden Knights. They were the Cardiac Canadiens in this one, pulling off a remarkable comeback.
Wilde Horses
The penalty kill for the Canadiens in this playoffs is bordering on the overused word ‘unbelievable’. Montreal is 25 for 25 in penalty kills in the last 10 games. There wasn’t much of an indication that this was possible in the regular season.
It starts with your goalie, of course, but after that, you need to rush the attackers to make bad plays, cover off the lanes of passing in all zones, and have the dedication that you are willing to take the pain of blocking a shot.
Artturi Lehkonen late in the second period was some of the best penalty-killing that you will see in hockey. You don’t have to just pressure the opposition in your own zone. If you can pressure them in front of their own goalie, then you lose 30 seconds that way, too. That’s just terrific hockey.
That has translated into a statistic that is unheard of, as the Canadiens have outscored the opposition this playoffs when they were shorthanded. Montreal has four shorthanded goals and has allowed only three power play goals in this post-season. Remarkable.
Cole Caufield is playing his first games as an NHL player at the most difficult time to shine in the game. The playoffs are ramped up five notches from the regular season and he is not intimidated or bothered in the slightest. That he is this good, this early, bodes so well for the future of this 20-year-old as a star in the league.
With the Canadiens desperately needing a good moment after just allowing the opening goal in the game, less than a minute later, it was Nick Suzuki with a pass to Caufield for a breakaway.
He calmly got a stubborn puck to finally lie flat, just before he shot it upstairs. Ping! The sweet sound of the bar down shot was unmistakable. Caufield made it look easy against one of the best in the game, Marc-Andre Fleury.
Credit goes to Suzuki as well, as he was just rocked a couple shifts previous on a huge hit, but he got right back at it to make a terrific pass. Suzuki and Caufield, 21 and 20 years of age, building chemistry for a decade is going to be a lot of fun — more fun than Habs fans have had in a long time. This is real.
Josh Anderson has had a terrible time trying to get on the scoreboard these playoffs, but he’s played a big-bodied game and has been hard to take off the puck, providing good moments of cycling. What has been missing though is that signature drive to the net with speed and strength.
It was back in this one, though. He drove hard, which puts a lot of fear into the goalie when this huge man is coming at you. He crashed into the goal in the first period hard, trying to work that play. That’s dedication to the cause. No one wants to do the play. No one wants to abandon their own body like that. So good for Anderson to try to find some real strong aggression when the easy is not coming for him right now. It’s been a tough playoff. This is his blueprint. Keep doing your blueprint. It’s what got you here.
With the game winding down, he got his reward for the effort. Fleury’s stick-handling error resulted in an empty net that Anderson pounced on. They earned an overtime thanks to Carey Price.
It was one of the most lopsided games you can see in the NHL playoffs. Price was there to hold the Canadiens in the contest long enough to force overtime. So many quality saves for Price as he is certainly in the heads of the forwards. If he could only psyche-out the defenders.
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Seriously, though, how does a six-foot-three-inch human being have such flexibility? The Golden Knights are trying to get Price to go laterally, which is the way to beat the modern goalie. A lateral save is so much harder to make. Price has made five of them with his large and flexible frame that perhaps most other goalies make once. Marner, Matthews, Schiefele, Stone, Tuch, they were all shaking their heads at sure goals that were not when, somehow, Price got across the net in record time.
So to overtime, where the Canadiens played their best hockey of the night by far; it was the only period they were the better team. They saved the best for last and they got the result, at least in OT, that they deserved.
It’s Jesperi Kotkaniemi who started the play with the heads up pass to Josh Anderson, who somehow knocked it out of midair. He couldn’t find it, but Paul Byron could. His sell of the shot to freeze Fleury was as good as a freeze gets. Fleury was melting into the ice when Byron calmly slid it over to Anderson. The net could not have been more open, and he slotted it home easily for his second of the night.
Three amazing moments to make one amazing goal: Kotkaniemi a planned backhand pass to the offensive zone, Anderson bats it out of the air with terrific eye-hand coordination, Byron with the fake of the year. All three moments needed to be executed perfectly to produce the game winner.
The Canadiens won in overtime on one of the best plays start to finish that you can see. It wasn’t cheap, it was beautiful. Byron was on the waiver wire for anyone to take three different times. He remained and now he has been involved in three of the biggest goals this century for Montreal.
Wilde Goats
This game resembled when the Canadiens were trying to find the energy at the end of the regular season, playing four games in six nights and five games in eight nights. Right from the get-go, they were a team trying to find its legs.
They were second on pucks. They had a terrible time winning puck battles. They couldn’t sustain a forecheck. It was a mess of a first period for sure. The shots on goal were 17-3 in the first for Vegas. The Canadiens didn’t get a first shot until 11:27 of the opening frame.
During the regular season run, it was very easy to see when they had no legs. By the five minute mark, you could make a proclamation of loss or win rather easily. It’s hard to know why a team can’t find its form here, though. No reason to struggle as if they were playing their sixth game in eight nights.
The good thing is thanks to Carey Price they were able to stay in the game. The game of hockey can be called ‘Goalie’ for a short time, but not a seven-game series getting dominated like this.
Can it? I mean, can it? Can you rely on your goalie this much?
The shots on goal were 25-5 halfway through the 60 minutes and it was still 1-1 in the contest. That is a gift from your goalie that is fairly unequaled in hockey. However, at a certain point, you have to find that part of the game where you are the better team. It was 35-13 shots for Vegas halfway through the third period as Montreal just simply was second best by a large margin.
At least we have definitively seen something that Montreal is missing. It’s the defence that is hurting the Habs. Montreal seems to have the forwards figured out fairly well. Alex Pietrangelo, Alec Martinez and Shea Theodore are puck-moving defencemen. Vegas has eight goals in the series with the blue liners having six. They join the rush to create total hockey.
It’s a five-man game where all players can do all things. They join the rush like forwards. This breaks down systems. It’s what the Canadiens lack. They’re going to need one or two puck-moving defenders going forward. For now though, the game is called ‘goalie’.
Wilde Cards
With the Canadiens getting their second dose of vaccine on June 9th, there was a huge sigh of relief that COVID-19 was finally behind them.
Not so fast.
Head coach Dominique Ducharme tested positive Thursday in Las Vegas. The anxiety moved up and off the chart. A second test was conducted Friday. It also tested positive.
Despite the math being heavily in Ducharme’s favour that the vaccine would protect him, he broke right through it. The biggest moments of his life and somehow he caught the virus. Luke Richardson, an AHL head coaching veteran, took over behind the bench.
The big fear was that it would sweep through the team. The league announced a long time ago that they were out of time to finish the season. If a team had an explosion of cases, it was over for them. That team would forfeit the series.
Keep in mind that the NHL said an explosion. If you can ice a team and the case count stays low, perhaps two or three players, and it stayed contained, then only those players would be prohibited from playing. And the series could go on.
So far, that is a news item that need not be concentrated upon as the Canadiens players all tested negative Thursday and Friday.
They’ll be tested Saturday and Sunday, too. By Monday, it should be safe. The incubation period for the virus is 14 days, but mostly it is in the three- to five-day range that one tests positive after exposure.
Not to get too bogged down in details, but the only time Ducharme is in close enough quarters with his players to contaminate them is likely the airplane. Because of air filtering systems, airplanes are one of the safest indoor spaces.
Add to that that the head coach usually sits in row one, so he wouldn’t be breathing directly into the crowd on the flight home. These are just inferences, though, and not to be taken as certainties, but it’s nice to know the players sit at the back.
The vaccines are effective as well, and it is unlikely that Ducharme would have been carrying a large viral load. Also unlikely is that players have their vaccine break down its protection as well. Breaking through a vaccine to be a positive case is rare, though it does happen.
The vaccine is not a guarantee, but the statistics are extremely good against catching COVID-19 with two doses. The players are only four days short of having the second dose immune response be complete.
All this to say that there is no guarantee here, but between a second dose of the vaccine for the players, the players’ limited contact with Ducharme, Ducharme symptom-free and likely carrying little viral load, airplanes having good air circulation, and two days passed already, the club should survive this without a worst case scenario.
Should.
Logic is very much in their favour. It would be a shocking breakdown of the vaccine, masks and social distancing to cause so many cases that the unthinkable happens.
Brian Wilde, a Montreal-based sports writer, brings you Call of the Wilde on globalnews.ca after each Canadiens game.
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