CANADIENS
Montreal

RANGERS
New York

Game Notes:

60 minutes. The Canadiens have been outplayed in many games this season, yet have won.  You can thank Carey Price.  Coming into this game, the Habs were outshot in 25 of their 46 games.  Of the 25, they won 15.  The team has struggled to get off to a good start and put in a 60 minute effort.  Against the Rangers, they did both.  In addition, the Canadiens ramped up their defensive effort.  The game was tight, intense and featured great goaltending.  It was a playoff-like atmosphere.

Price is King.  Despite the Canadiens playing better defensively, a stellar performance was required from Carey Price facing one of the league’s hottest teams.  And Price was brilliant in registering his sixth career shutout against the Rangers.  Martin St. Louis is still trying to figure out how Price robbed him.

Energy man. Dale Weise is an energy player.  He has no business playing on the first line of any team in the league, least of all one that hopes to be a contender.  Having said that, Weise’s speed, forechecking and drive to the net was a really asset to the Tomas Plekanec line in this game. Weise was tied with linemate, Max Pacioretty for the team lead in shots on goal with four each.  Add three shots from Plekanec and the first line had 11 of the Canadiens 26 shots on goal.

Laser pucks.  They tested them in the All-Star game: pucks with an embedded chip and 14 emitters as part of a system to gather analytics. And help to make rulings on goal calls.  The Canadiens could have used one on Thursday night.  Dale Weise fired a puck that went off Henrik Lundqvist’s goal pad which was in the net behind the goal line.  The puck went in and out far too quickly for the eyes of the officials on the ice.  And replays in the NHL war room proved “inconclusive.” So logically the puck was in, but there wasn’t evidence to support it.  Even New York Post writer Larry Brooks tweeted, “Pad’s in the net, puck’s off the pad…draw your own conclusion.”

Plus / Minus

▲▲  Carey Price

▲    Andrei Markov, Max Pacioretty, Tomas Plekanec, Alexei Emelin, Dale Weise

▼    Alex Galchenyuk, David Desharnais, Michael Bournival, Christian Thomas

1.  Carey Price  MTL
2.  Henrik Lundqvist  NYR
3.  Max Pacioretty  MTL

• “It was a big improvement. We were engaged in the game. We were pressing with and without the puck. By doing that you take a lot of time and space away from the other team.”
• “This is something we discussed before the game, that we’ve got to get back to the things we used to do, play a tight checking game. There’s going to be some mistakes by both teams, and Carey  [made] some great saves at the right time.”

Carey Price

• “I just kind of reacted. He batted it out of the air; I got a shoulder and an ear on it. I thought it went behind me so I spun around and it wound up underneath me.”
• “These are the types of games you want to be able to win as a team. I know it’s fun to win a game 6-5, but if we want to be successful we’re going to have to really bear down on those low-scoring, tight-checking games.”

P.K. Subban

• “We’re a meat-and-potatoes team; we’re not a high-flying, open-ice kind of team. We want to play a tight game. We want to chip the puck in. We want to grind it out. We want to force other teams to make mistakes. Hockey is a game of mistakes and it usually comes down [to] the team that makes the least amount of mistakes, right? For us tonight [we] knew it was going to be a lucky bounce and I’m just happy we got it.”

Max Pacioretty

• “That was a playoff game. We were grinding. We put pucks in deep and they did the same. We play a very similar game to them – definitely fast paced – but tight-checking as well.  We liked the way we played, so we’ve got to build off of that now and keep going.”

Rangers coach Alain Vigneault

• “An inch there, an inch here and we might have been able to beat their goaltender. I thought our guys battled hard, but some nights it’s like this.”