The the first Habs goal sent the crowd into the stratosphere, the second sent them into orbit and the third buried the Boston Bruins - this time their comeback from a multiple goal deficit falling short as they fell to the Canadiens by a score of 4-2 in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference Semifinal series.
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| An uncovered Tomas Plekanec scores Montreal's first goal |
The Canadiens now leads the best-of-seven series two games to one, with Game 4 scheduled for Thursday night at the Bell Centre in Montreal.
When the Habs went to their room at the first intermission with a 2-0 lead - leading in every single category that there is - one had to think that the Bruins had them right where they wanted them.
Even down 3-1 at the end of the second after dominating the period, the feeling remained - and why not? This is the team that erased two-goal deficits in each of the first two games of the series, both times putting multiple biscuits in the basket in fairly short order.
And they did score twice and had several chances to tack on more, but having to scramble from behind is a bad way to fly, and certainly isn't Bruins' hockey - at least not as far as bench boss Claude Julien is concerned.
"It's the way our team plays, we play until the end," Julien said of his team's typical 60 minute effort, "(but) If we start relying on how we play in the third period, we'll be making a big mistake."
Indeed, particularly when working hard, but not working smart - because to ignore the mental part of the game, the place where the most elementary of the fundamentals exist, is playing losing hockey.
Tuesday night, despite the all-out effort, the Bruins played a losing brand of hockey.
"We just made stupid mistakes which ended up costing us the game, so we have to get rid of those." Boston Goalie Tuukka Rask said after the game. "I don’t think we played bad"
No, the Bruins' didn't play badly but all three of the goals pinned on Rask were imminently avoidable and the mistakes made defied basic defensive fundamentals - something that is ingrained in the structure of this Bruins' team - and just goes to show that even the best teams are not immune to the harrowing trials of cutting corners and losing focus.
A perfect example of cutting corners came on the Canadiens' second goal with five minutes left in the opening period.
Montreal's P.K. Subban was in the penalty box for trying to decapitate Bruins' winger Reilly Smith with an elbow, and with the clock ticking down on a dismal Bruins' power play but the puck at the opposite end of the ice, Rask decided that he didn't need to tap his stick to let his teammates know that Subban was just seconds from freedom.
"That's part of my job, I have to let them know." lamented Rask in hindsight. "But I kind of looked at it and I thought we had everything under control and stuff like that, so I decided not to, and it ends up in our net."
Subban emerged from the sin bin just as teammate Lars Eller took possession of a loose puck after a brief scrum in front of the Canadiens' net - Eller escorting the puck into the neutral zone which drew defenseman Dougie Hamilton and centerman Patrice Bergeron to him and allowing the undetected Subban to slip behind the defense.
Carl Soderberg was the first to realize that Subban was uncovered - besides Rask, of course - but he had no realistic chance at making a play on the streaking defenseman.
The Canadiens also took advantage of the loss of defensive focus on their third goal as well, when forward Dale Weise released from the blue line just as Bruins' defenseman Andrej Meszaros launched a shot at Canadiens' goalie Carey Price - the shot was blocked by garden gnome Mike Weaver and the puck picked up by forward Daniel Briere, who found Weise uncovered behind Mazsaros and Johnny Boychuck.
"Yeah, they were stretching us out, but I don't think that's something we didn't expect," Meszaros said. "Obviously we're watching videos and so we know what to expect from them. We just need to execute better..."
"I think a couple times when we were shooting up from the point, they had one guy taking off and we didn't account for that guy right away." echoed fellow blue liner Kevan Miller, "We just need to do a better job of not letting guys get behind us."
Obviously, the Canadiens know that the Bruins' defensemen shoot from the point a lot, and their game plan of swarming defense in the neutral zone to not allow clean entry into their zone and clogging the slot once Boston establishes themselves in the attacking zone is made easier by Boston's long-range snipers, and if the high man loses track of the forward, it makes those bombs from the point that much more risky.
The Bruins are the more talented team, but the separation between them and the third-seeded Canadiens is not so much that they can let their guard down and cut corners and expect the fact that they won the President's Trophy for the best record in the NHL to win games for them - all that honor afforded them was home ice advantage throughout the playoffs, something that the Canadiens have already taken away from them.
"We’re a very resilient team and you see that, but you can’t play yourself out of the hole every night, as much as we want to," Bruins' self-appointed mouth piece, tough guy Shawn Thornton said after the game. "I think the positive is that it shows the character of this room again, that we don’t give up until the final buzzer."
Being resilient is great, and the never-say-die attitude is grand, but to play Bruins' hockey - taking the lead by force and stepping on their opponent's throats - is preferable to the losing catch-up hockey that they are playing now.
"In the first period we had an off period and it cost us a lot and we had to come back again." said Jarome Iginla, whose defensive miscue in the first period contributed to the first goal. "We can be better. And it's something now, this game is behind us, we'll go over it. And as the second and third periods went along we started building our game again and we're going to need that."
What they need is to play the brand of hockey that got them here, and that means taking nothing - including the fundamentals - for granted.
