The Canadiens earned two opportunities to eliminate the Sabres from the Stanley Cup Playoffs and move on to a meeting with the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Final for one particular reason, and they lost sight of that Saturday night in Montreal. In the chaos of overcoming yet another early deficit only to take a 3-1 lead on three consecutive shots that chased Alex Lyon from the game, their overeagerness to close the series blurred their focus.
The Canadiens were too aggressive, and with that, their poise and composure weren’t the only things that got away from them. Their defence-first commitment fell off a cliff.
It became Montreal’s unlikely calling card after filling the net through the first two-thirds of the regular season. They were the second-highest scoring team but the 24th-stingiest in the NHL from the start of the season up until the March 6 trade deadline. From that point forward up until the start of the playoffs, they flipped their focus and posted the fifth-best goals-against average in the league while still producing 3.09 goals per game.
The Canadiens went 15-6-1 over those final 22 games, and while Jakub Dobes was a difference maker in all that, he wasn’t the only one.
That story continued through Round 1 of these playoffs.
Dobes upped his game, but the Tampa Bay Lightning also forced the Canadiens to raise theirs in front of him, and that combination is what got them to Round 2.
“You go seven games, one-goal games, the margin of error is thin,” said Martin St. Louis, “and sometimes it’s not necessarily the offensive things that are going to get you the win.”
The defensive things got the Canadiens most of the opportunities they had to score against the Lightning, and they were also largely responsible for the team winning two of the first three games against the Sabres before a resounding third one was earned the last time they were in Buffalo.
Dobes made 32 saves in Game 5, but even the Sabres knew there was a more relevant factor in the 6-3 loss that put their season on the brink.
“I think that is (them) playing good defence,” goaltender Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen said. “You know, (Dobes is) playing good, no denying that, but I think (it’s) how well they defend, how many pucks are loose over there but they kind of get them away in front of him. They did a good job with that, so I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily (Dobes’s performance). I think it’s more how well they’re defending as a team.”
That will be Montreal’s salvation in Game 7 if they took the right lesson from Game 6.
In Game 6, the Canadiens got up by two goals and were so anxious to step on the vulnerable Sabres that they lost the plot.
Their only player with a Stanley Cup ring perfectly summarized that plot on the morning of Game 3.
“The defence is the biggest part of playoffs,” said Alex Newhook. “We’re finding offence right now, but we’re defending hard, we’re making it hard on them to get inside. On the looks they’re getting, Dobes is coming up big obviously. But I think when we need to defend, we’re doing that, and that’s gotta be the biggest part of our identity moving forward.”
The Canadiens hadn’t lost sight of that in following up their 5-1 Game 2 win with a 6-2 win in Game 3.
Despite losing Game 4 by a score of 3-2 because their power play went 1-for-7, they erased a shaky start to Game 5 with the defensive resolve Luukkonen referenced, and won 6-3.
When the Canadiens rewatched the tape from Game 6 Sunday, it’s impossible to imagine they failed to identify the reason they lost 8-3.
On it, they saw Juraj Slafkovsky fumble the puck in the neutral zone and then his own zone before flailing out of position to give Rasmus Dahlin a clear path to the net on the first goal 32 seconds in. They saw Zach Benson get a free pass to their net on the goal that made it 3-3 one minute into the second period. They saw Kaiden Guhle pinch at his own blue line instead of keeping Jason Zucker in front of him, offering Zucker and Konsta Helenius the two-on-one rush that led to that backbreaking 5-3 goal.
That last one was just one of seven odd-man rushes the Canadiens gave the Sabres through the first two periods, according to SportLogiq. Watching how they did it would only emphasize how out of character they played.
Out of character was giving Sabres 22 high-danger chances and 15 slot shots on net off 46 slot-driving plays, not to mention four power-play goals.
“It wasn’t our game,” St. Louis told reporters at Montreal Metropolitan Airport before the Canadiens returned to Buffalo Sunday.
Their game is the one he described last Sunday.
“I think we started a lot last year into understanding that defensive hockey is a big part of a winning recipe,” St. Louis said. “You need to score goals, but I feel we’ve progressed, and progressed, and progressed throughout the last two seasons, and I don’t feel our offensive game hurts because we’re getting better defensively.
“I feel we’re learning to manage games better, and when it’s time to defend we can defend. We talk about defending so far from our end zone, and to me, when you lose the puck anywhere, you’re defending. And I feel like we’ve gotten really better at that so that hopefully you have to defend less in your zone. And I feel when we have to defend in our zone, we’re engaged there too.”
The Canadiens disengagement from all that, in their excitement of everything but the first shift going their way, was their undoing Saturday.
“You have to understand why we didn’t have a good game,” said St. Louis, and he didn’t have to add that both he and the Canadiens know the reason was they lost focus.
From up 3-1, they took a bad penalty and paid for it. From up 3-2, they mismanaged the game in every facet and paid royally for it.
As Nick Suzuki, Noah Dobson, Lane Hutson and St. Louis said, most of the damage was self-inflicted.
All of them also rightly gave the Sabres credit.
We’ll give Lindy Ruff his: The Buffalo coach reminded his players why they made it far enough to have a chance to get to a seventh game in Round 2. He tapped into their identity.
“I told the team I would rather err that they made a mistake going than not going,” Ruff said.
The expression he emphasized in the leadup to Game 6 was “JFG” (Just Bleeping Go) because that’s what the Sabres did to win 50 games and snap a 14-year playoff drought this season. They threw caution to the wind, made defence an afterthought and attacked.
That strategy reversed another season headed for the gutter, it ultimately saved the Sabres from being eliminated Saturday night (with Montreal’s help), and it’s unquestionably the one they’ll employ in the hopes of their greatest escape in Game 7.
But it barely worked for the Sabres in Game 1 and totally exposed them in Games 2, 3 and 5 because the Canadiens played the composed, calculated, collective game that’s led to their greatest success this season.
“If we bring our A-game we believe in our chances,” said Phillip Danault.
The operative word was our.
That has countered the Sabres’ style of play successfully to date, and it’s what the Canadiens must do again to advance.
