CANADIENS
Montreal

RED WINGS
Detroit

Lineup

Forward lines and defense pairings 

[one_half]Pacioretty – Galchenyuk – Radulov
Lehkonen – Plekanec – Andrighetto
Byron – Danault – Shaw
De La Rose – Mitchell – Flynn
[/one_half]

[one_half_last]Emelin – Weber
Beaulieu – Petry
Barberio – Redmond
[/one_half_last]

Goaltenders

Price
Montoya

Scratches

Daniel Carr, Ryan Johnston, Mike McCarron

Injured Reserve

David Desharnais (knee), Greg Pateryn (ankle), Andrei Markov (lower body)

Game Report

It was a 3:00 pm. start time in Detroit for a MLK Day game. It’s understandable that Montreal fans would complain about the early puck drop but no player would use it as an excuse for the loss, would they?

“It was a weird game to play at 3:00 p.m., and I thought we were lacking a bit at first, but after that I thought we were alright. It’s tough to wake up early and try to get the legs going early. We play a couple of 3:00 p.m. games a year, but it’s no excuse — they had to do it too.” — Nathan Beaulieu

From his post-game statement and his play on the ice, it was clear that Beaulieu would rather have been napping. Since being promoted to the second pairing, Beaulieu’s defensive zone play has gone from being unsteady to an enormous liability. Finally today, coach Michel Therrien had seen enough and dropped Beaulieu to the third pairing playing just 15:27.

Mark Barberio stepped in to play alongside Jeff Petry logging almost 21 minutes of ice-time.

After the Minnesota game, Carey Price spoke about the inability to generate offence. Ditto for Monday’s game as Detroit’s Jared Coreau lounged on his way to his first shutout at the Joe. The Canadiens managed just 18 shots on goal and fewer than two handfuls of scoring chances.

Carey Price was the far busier of the two goaltenders fending off open looks and a breakaway or two. On the Red Wings only goal, Price played it correctly, Alexei Emelin defended well but the puck took at odd bounce off Thomas Vanek’s shin pad.

Alexander Radulov, Max Pacioretty and Alex Galchenyuk were the Canadiens most dangerous line but only offered a couple of grade ‘A’ scoring chances. Galchenyuk looked winded after many of his 54 second shifts in this game.

~~~

▲     Carey Price, Alexei Emelin, Shea Weber, Max Pacioretty, Alexander Radulov, Zach Redmond

▼     Nathan Beaulieu, Torrey Mitchell, Brian Flynn

1.  Jared Coreau  DET
2.  Thomas Vanek  DET
3.  Carey Price  MTL

• “We didn’t get the puck luck.”
• “I didn’t like that the way that Beaulieu and Petry were playing, especially lately too, so we decided to make that change.”

Max Pacioretty

• “We had a couple of Grade A shots on goal. I can think of [Alex Galchenyuk’s chance] and mine, plus [Nathan Beaulieu] hit the post… Maybe if we had put one of those in, we could have turned things around, but it just wasn’t the case tonight.”
• “It was a hard-fought game and I think we played hard for 60. It wasn’t perfect — no game is — but I like the way we competed until the end. I thought our line had a ton of offensive zone time. We were looking for a bounce, but didn’t seem to get it.”

Mark Barberio

• “Neither team gave up a lot through the neutral zone. The one goal that went in was just a point shot that I think was going wide — I think it hit a leg [on the way in]. It was just one of those games.”

Paul Byron

• “We’ve got to give them credit, they did a great job of slowing us down. They played a really tight neutral zone and didn’t let us get pucks back. Tonight it just seemed like we didn’t have enough speed like we normally do.”

Quotes courtesy of NHL.com