Habs resume playoff push in Carolina
Canadiens need win against Hurricanes to make headway in Eastern Conference
A .500 record on the road is considered good but, after splitting four road games before Christmas, the Canadiens are going to have to be better than that over the final three games of their seven-game Christmas road trip if they hope to stay within hailing distance of a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.
The journey begins Wednesday with a brief visit to Raleigh, N.C., to play the Hurricanes (7 p.m., TSN2, RDS. TSN-690 Radio). Normally, teams fly into a city the night before the game, but that requirement was superseded by the NHL rules on time off over the holidays. That means the Canadiens had to be up early Wednesday morning to catch a 7:30 a.m. charter flight.
The Hurricanes currently hold a three-point lead on Montreal, but the teams are almost carbon copies of each other. The Canadiens are 25th in offence with 2.69 goals a game and the Hurricanes are only slightly better at 2.71. Both teams have allowed more than three goals a game, but the starting goaltenders — Carey Price and Carolina’s Cam Ward — have played well in December.
Special teams? They match bad power plays against even worse penalty-killing units.
The similarities would suggest this is one of those games that will be settled by hard work. The Canadiens showed their work ethic in last week’s 3-2 win in Calgary, but it was totally absent in the 3-0 outdoor loss to Ottawa at the beginning of the trip. It’s that inconsistency that has frustrated coach Claude Julien.
There will be at least one change on defence for the Carolina game and it won’t involve the return of Shea Weber, who has missed the past three games with a foot injury. There has been no update on his condition, but he wasn’t expected to make the trip south. Julien will sub Jakub Jerabek for recently recalled Brett Lernout, who struggled in Saturday’s 4-1 loss to Edmonton.
Julien said he knows Lernout can play better, but there is an urgency to earn points and Jerabek has proved to be dependable since he was recalled from Laval.
The Carolina game is the first of a back-to-back set, with the Canadiens moving to Tampa Bay Thursday for what promises to be the most difficult test on this trip. The Lightning is the No. 1 team in the NHL, has the NHL’s top offence — led by Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos — and, with Andrei Vasilevskiy, the Lightning has one of the best goaltenders in the league.
The Tampa game offers an interesting subplot because it marks the first meeting between Canadiens forward Jonathan Drouin and Lightning defenceman Mikhail Sergachev since they were traded for each other in June. Sergachev, who has the benefit of a better supporting cast, has eight goals and 23 points and is plus-12. Drouin has five goals and 18 points and is minus-14. He has only one assist in the six games since he returned after missing four games with a lower-body injury.
The post-Christmas road trip ends Saturday with a game against the Florida Panthers, another team struggling to make the playoffs. They are currently three points up on Montreal.
The pre-Christmas split means Montreal lost ground to the redhot Boston Bruins, who have opened up a seven-point edge in the battle for third place in the Eastern Conference and also hold two games in hand.
The key is to stay close to Boston until mid-January when the Canadiens and the Bruins meet three times over eight days. Two of those games are Saturday night fixtures at the Bell Centre, which should bring a smile to downtown bar and restaurant owners as well as ticket resellers who have been losing money in a soft ticket market.