Canadiens 5, Canucks 4 (SO): Wild times in Old Montreal
Four games in six days isn’t easy for any NHL team. In the fast and furious season that is this COVID-affected year, they seem even more draining.
The Montreal Canadiens and Vancouver Canucks were the latest cases to this point on Saturday night, as they played a wild game at Bell Centre in Montreal.
Montreal came away with a 5-4 shootout win. It was a back and forth affair, with plenty of moments where players made bad defensive reads, and goalies fought pucks at times.
It was, in other words, a very weird game.
“It was a hard fought game. I like that we battled back when we weren’t playing well. I didn’t like the second half of the second period,” head coach Travis Green said.
He acknowledged that the busy week likely factored into how his team played, though he didn’t want to use fatigue as an excuse, either.
The Canucks have done plenty this week, though, and while Montreal still hold four games in hand on them, the Canucks’ playoff hopes are no longer only a flicker — though being brighter than a flicker still isn’t saying much.
NEXT GAME
Monday
Winnipeg Jets vs. Vancouver Canucks
7 p.m.,
Rogers Arena,
TV: Sportsnet Pacific, TSN3, Radio: Sportsnet 650 AM
The Canucks got goals from Brock Boeser, Jake Virtanen, Bo Horvat and Tyler Motte, while Montreal’s goals were scored by Nick Suzuki, Tomas Tatar, Joel Edmundson and Brendan Gallagher.
Tatar had the shootout winner, in the sixth round of attempts. It was the first shootout win of the season for the Canadiens. This was the ninth and final meeting between the two teams, Montreal’s sixth win outright over the Canucks this season.
Here’s what we learned …
Bang bang
After their atrocious first period — the second of the Canucks’ two shots came just 3:28 in, a long-bomb shot from the neutral zone by Travis Hamonic — the Canucks came hot out of the dressing room for the second.
They played with the kind of spark that carried them to a win on Friday night and were deserving of Virtanen’s goal, which came out of some excellent down-low forechecking by J.T. Miller and Jimmy Vesey, who has been solid in his first two games for the Canucks.
Virtanen picked a great lane off the puck and came down Broadway to whack home a perfect pass from Miller. The puck was deflected some so you wonder if Price might have made the save otherwise, but the Canucks didn’t care.
The tally also meant Virtanen was the ninth Canuck to score over the team’s last 10 goals.
One-timer
Boeser has a great wrist shot. We’ve seen him score some nice breakaway goals.
The past two seasons he’s spent some time as the net-front player on power plays, tipping shots from the outside and banging in loose pucks.
Suffice it to say, he’s a true sniper.
Warranted or not, the one perceived wrinkle in his shooting talents has been his one-timers.
He might as well have said “sorry, what?” after the one-timer he hammered home to put the Canucks up 2-1 midway through the second. Carey Price looked utterly baffled by the shot Boeser fired past him off a Quinn Hughes pass.
Let there be light
Braden Holtby couldn’t see the shooter on the Suzuki goal, which was also quite the snipe, and on the Gallagher goal, which came right after a clean face-off win. He was obstructed in tracking the puck on the Tatar and Edmundson goals, which were both shots from the top of the face-off circles, and Holtby might have wanted them back.
We saw what happens when you don’t get in front of shots effectively on Saturday night.
“If you’re going to be in front of the goalie, you’ve got to be in front of the shot,” Green said.
The Canucks have been a good shot-blocking team this month, but Holtby said teams are getting better all the time at finding holes in screens in front of goalies.
“Defencemen are learning where to shoot,” he said. “They don’t just shoot to the open side, they shoot to piles.”
Lucky 22
Virtanen’s goal came 22 seconds into the second … and so did Horvat’s in the third.
The Canucks captain got a perfect tip on a Quinn Hughes point shot, tying the game right off the hop. Given how cleanly he won the draw and then was left unchecked, it was also a serious defensive miscue by Montreal.
Hurry hard
When you see a line’s wingers are Motte and Jayce Hawryluk, you know there’s one thing you can count one: hard work and hustle.
Every once in a while, they also pull off a moment of magic. Motte’s go-ahead goal 33 seconds after Horvat’s was one of those, as he fired home a wrist shot from the top of the slot.
It was his sixth of the season, another display of how well-rounded his game has become, and an example of why other teams might be interested in a player like him heading into the playoffs.
Rough start
Tyler Myers had a rough shift. Then the Habs scored.
For the second night in a row, Montreal grabbed the game’s first goal on an early power play.
Myers was knocked off the puck in the corner by Jesperi Kotkaniemi during what was a poor defensive shift for the Canucks overall. He got caught chasing with his mates and eventually was whistled for interference on Arrturi Lehkonen.
It led to a power play for the red-hot Canadiens unit, which is running over 30 per cent since head coach Dominique Ducharme and assistant coach Alex Burrows took over.
The rest of the period went no better for the Canucks, who hobbled to the dressing room after the first period with just two shots on goal and were fortunate to get a strong start from Holtby to keep the score close.
pjohnston@postmedia.com
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