‘Our back end had a tough night,’ Julien says
Price victimized by careless play in defensive zone against Devils
There are probably going to be some Canadiens fans putting the blame on Carey Price for Wednesday night’s 5-2 loss to the New Jersey Devils when they see the goalie only faced 28 shots. They would be wrong. No goalie was going to get a win for the Canadiens on this night as the defence coughed up the puck time and again in their own zone and left Devils players standing alone in front of the net. The Devils’ first goal came when the Canadiens couldn’t clear the zone and Kyle Palmieri deflected in a point shot while standing alone in front of Price. The Devils’ second goal came after Jesperi Kotkaniemi cleanly won a defensive zone faceoff, only to watch defenceman Mike Reilly get beaten to the puck behind the net by Taylor Hall, who then set up Nico Hischier standing in front. Hall was the one left alone in front of Price for the Devils’ third goal on a tick-tack-toe play, while Pavel Zacha was alone at the side of the net for the Devils’ fourth goal. Zacha also scored the fifth goal after splitting the Canadiens’ defence at the blue-line and going in alone on Price. Jonathan Drouin and Max Domi scored for the Canadiens. “Well, our back end had a tough night … there’s no doubt about that,” Canadiens coach Claude Julien said after the game. “But at the end of the day, there’s a lot of things, too, the forwards can do on the defensive side of things. Even our backcheck … our backchecking at times, once we get past the blue-line, they’re still beating us to the net. So we need to be better in those situations as a team, not just as defencemen. “But the defencemen, definitely, I think we need a little bit more in winning battles and killing plays and making sure that those kind of situations that happened tonight — a lack of, I guess, not doing the right assignment and leaving somebody all by himself to the side of the net. I think those are mistakes tonight.” Julien was asked if it might be a case of the Canadiens simply not having the horses on defence — especially with Shea Weber still sidelined after off-season knee surgery. “I’m not going there, guys,” the coach said. “Weber’s skating with us (in practices). That the good news. We’ll figure it out here as we go along . ... You can’t win in this league if you don’t have all 19 horses going and tonight we didn’t have 19 horses going.” The biggest horse is Weber, and he can’t come back soon enough. But even when Weber does return, he’s a 33-year-old defenceman who won’t have played a game in a full year. Price wasn’t around to talk with the media after the game, but he never really says much anyways. The goalie has to be frustrated as his record fell to 7-5-4 with a 3.17 goals-against average and an .895 save percentage. It was surprising Julien didn’t pull Price after two periods for mercy. When asked if Price asked to stay in the game, Julien said: “I don’t think that matters. That’s internal stuff. How we handle things, I don’t think has to be public knowledge. Basically, it was handled, and I think it was handled the right way.” But how does Julien handle the defence moving forward? He’s talked about competition for jobs on the blue-line being a good thing, but there’s one less body now with Noah Juulsen on the injured-reserve list with a facial fracture. Could that competition be causing pressure problems among the defencemen, who might be so worried about making mistakes that they’re making even more? “It’s the NHL,” said Xavier Ouellet, a defencemen who has been in and out of the lineup. “Pressure is part of it. You have to learn how to deal with it. It can’t be an excuse for the way you play. You got to perform through the pressure, it’s part of it. It’s a competition. You know every day, every year, there’s new kids coming in looking for your job. So it’s nothing new here. It’s our job to respond.” They didn’t respond against the Devils. The question now is: Can the horses the Canadiens have on defence ever really respond — even when the biggest one returns to the lineup?