Glimmers of Hope | Three Stars of the Week, NHL, Habs, Montreal Canadiens, Shea Weber, Nick Suzuki, Carey Price
ROCKET SPORTS MEDIA — Hello there, folks! Back with another edition of my three stars of the week column!
Players will earn points each time they appear as a star in this column and at the end of the year, I will award my three stars of the season.
The Canadiens find themselves trailing 3-0 in the Stanley Cup Finals. Obviously, not many have looked as good as previous weeks, but here are three guys who stood out to me.
☆ THIRD STAR: Shea Weber
I wanted to talk about Shea Weber last week after he scored in game six against Vegas and given the minutes that he has logged throughout this run with his injured hand, what Weber has done during this playoff run has been incredible.
After game one in Tampa had concluded, I took a look at the box score and was marvelling at how Shea Weber managed to get out of a 5-1 loss, in which he played 25 minutes, at plus-one, but then I remembered that this was the same guy who managed to get out of a 10-0 loss at even. Yes, plus/minus is not the best metric to use to see an individual’s impact on the game, but when the rest of the “Clydesdales” were all minus players in game one, it is pretty impressive.
Then in game three it was Weber who picked up the lone assist on the Phillip Danault goal to bring the Canadiens back within one. Things have obviously not been going well for the Canadiens, but even with these rather lopsided losses, Weber has not strayed far from being the stabilizing presence he always is.
Weber’s leadership and levelheadedness in this adverse moment will be crucial for the Canadiens to try to extend this series.
☆ SECOND STAR: Nick Suzuki
Times throughout the regular season when things were not going well, which was quite often, I would just look at the performance of the young guys and grasp onto that for some positivity. The Canadiens find themselves down 3-0 in the Stanley Cup Final. The series deficit the Habs face is unfortunate, but for them to be in this spot is valuable experience for someone like the 21-year-old Suzuki.
But it is not just about being in this spot, it is about how Nick Suzuki is playing in this spot and while he did not look particularly good in game one, he scored goals in games two and three and while both may not have been the prettiest goals he has ever scored, they are goals in the Stanley Cup Finals.
As the season wound down and the playoffs began, I talked about Suzuki showing all the signs of being a guy who raised his game when the games get more important. He closed out the season strong when the Canadiens needed to solidify themselves as a playoff team and now that they are here in the playoffs, Suzuki has been their leading scorer and has generally been a reliable player all over the ice against some really stiff competition.
I understand the frustration given the way the series has gone to this point, but if you are looking for a small glimmer of hope, I think the play of Suzuki at the biggest stage there is, is a pretty good place to start.
☆ FIRST STAR: Carey Price
This may not be popular, given that social media has been all over Carey Price and reverted back to the tried and tested method of blaming him for just about every goal, but there is not another guy I can give this to in good faith. There is no argument for any other guy, the mistakes in front of Price have been too numerous and too egregious for even him to cover up.
He is trying to do the same thing he did through the first three rounds of the playoffs, but the turnovers, the miscues, the blown coverages, and an insanely bad line change have been too much for him to overcome.
If this playoff run has taught us anything, it is that Carey Price can still mask a lot of deficiencies, the long list of his incredible saves has kept growing even as the Canadiens have stumbled, but the Canadiens through three rounds were a little bit better at making his life easier, that has not at all been the case in the Stanley Cup Finals.
The Canadiens cannot afford to give this potent Lightning team rush opportunities, but they have given them far too many, including a clear cut two-on-none. They cannot afford to be sloppy in their own half of the ice and you have turnovers such as Danault’s in the dying moments of the second period in game two that led to a debilitating Lightning goal, Joel Edmundson and Jeff Petry’s poorly executed reversal that led to Ondrej Palat’s dagger goal in the same game and Erik Gustafsson being a complete and utter liability in his own zone.
On top of the turnovers, the Canadiens have not cleared out the front of the net as effectively has they had in the previous three series. Tampa knows one of the only ways to beat Price is take away his eyes and they have done that without much resistance from the Habs defencemen.
People have talked about rebound control and Price not being able to squeeze the Victor Hedman point blast through traffic, but Price is far from the reason the Canadiens find themselves in this spot. As I said, there is not somebody I could give this to over Price, he has done all he can to get the Canadiens here and is still trying to do the same, he has just not had the support necessary to win the first three games of this series.
The ultimate glimmer of hope for the Canadiens is they have Carey Price, but they will need to be much, much better in front of him to extend this series.
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By Joseph Whalen, Host, Canadiens Connection podcast
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