Gutsy, resilient Canadiens don’t know meaning of word ‘quit’
Game 4 heroics featured a cast of players with character to spare
The Canadiens were like the hero in some Grade B action flick. Knocked on the head, chloroformed, kicked, punched, sandblasted, wrapped in chains and dropped into a pit of starving crocodiles.
Like our Hollywood hero, they found a way out. And they did it with style.
After losing Game 3 the way they did, you had to wonder how the Canadiens would find the heart to take the ice for Game 4. All the omens looked bad. They had lost eight straight games to the Lightning. Towering Ben Bishop loomed in front of their shots like the Great Wall of Tampa. They couldn’t ice one superb offensive line; the Bolts had two.
Worse, the Canadiens had the better of the run of play through four periods and change in Game 1 and came out on the short end of the score after a missed offside call. They started Game 2 playing an almost perfect first period, lost their discipline, and were buried in power-play goals. To top it off, they were embroiled in the considerable distraction of the Brad Watson/ Brandon Prust flap.
Then came the capper. After outplaying the Lighting for 59 minutes and 58.9 seconds in Game 3 on the road, they surrendered The Goal with 1.1 seconds to play. The heartbreaker. The golf-course special.
By the end of Game 3, the Habs looked like a team that had finished a two-hour bag skate in 43-degree heat in New Delhi. Andrei Markov wasn’t just a greybeard, he was grey with fatigue. Tomas Plekanec looked as though he could barely stand.
David Desharnais, who had battled a gastro so wicked he needed intravenous fluids simply to make it into the lineup, appeared in need of a one-way ticket to a hospital bed.
It was time. The Canadiens would suck it up, put in a good showing in Game 4, lose by the standard 2-1 playoff score and hit the links. Even their staunchest supporters were replacing their CH car flags with the white flags of surrender.
Except that no one, least of all the Lightning, reckoned with the resilience of a bunch that doesn’t know how to spell “quit.” If nothing else, Marc Bergevin has stocked the roster with character players in his own image. Even the stars battle: P.K. Subban will skate himself and everyone else into the ice. Max Pacioretty, who is paid to snipe, has become a superb penalty-killing forward. And Carey Price, well — he isn’t going to win the Hart Trophy for nothing.
This is a gutsy, resilient team. Has been since the season’s first games, when their trademark was falling behind and battling back in the third period. Nowhere is it more visible than on the mug of Brendan Gallagher, who has a goal in each of the last two games. Gallagher has absorbed more hits than any forward in the playoffs and yet you can always find him in his office in front of the opposition net, taking a cross-check to the face with no call and still battling for every inch.
Thursday evening, the Canadiens took the ice in a warm arena in Tampa barely 21 hours after the goal that should have broken their backs, and the Little Team That Couldn’t Score put up a field goal on the formidable Bishop and another on his backup, Andrei Vasilevskiy. Pacioretty scored one of his brilliant short-handers, turning on the afterburners and coming in on Bishop as though he had been launched from Cape Canaveral before beating him with a quick, nasty shot.
How sweet was it? Well, Desharnais and Prust also scored.
Given the run of play from the beginning of this series, the 6-2 result should not have come as a surprise. The Canadiens should now be up three games to one.
Even before Thursday night, they had dominated lengthy stretches of every contest against Tampa, especially Game 3 when the Bolts failed to get a shot for the equivalent of a period and played (as the HNIC crew kept reminding us) one good minute in 40.
Then there was Bishop. The huge Lightning goalie is a bit of an enigma. He can look absolutely impregnable or he can look (as he did before he was pulled Thursday) like a walrus on ice skates. Glenn Healy and company kept saying Bolts coach Jon Cooper shouldn’t have pulled him but the way Bishop was playing it could have finished 10-2 rather than 6-2.
Bishop might continue to falter. Steven Stamkos might go on shooting blanks. Having found their scoring touch, the Canadiens might keep it rolling. Or all of that may be wishful thinking. Tampa Bay lost Game 5 at home in the first round, 4-0 to the Red Wings, before bouncing back to take the final two games and the series.
But Detroit doesn’t have Carey Price. Make no mistake the odds are still against the Canadiens. They have to win three straight against a team with a superior offence. Game 6, if they’re able to prolong it by winning at home Saturday, will be in Tampa.
Nothing preys on a team like doubts about its goaltending. Even if it’s no more than a niggling worry in the back of their minds, the Lightning players have to wonder what they will see from Bishop the rest of the way. If they start cheating just a bit to protect him, if the legs start to go after a bad goal, this could be the start of a legendary comeback.
Or not. For now, the Canadiens just have to take ‘em one game at a time. I think I’ve heard that one somewhere before.