CANADIENS
Montreal

LIGHTNING
Tampa Bay

Game Report

By winning their final four games of the 2013-’14 regular season, the Lightning finished just ahead of the Canadiens but were embarrassed by a four-game sweep at the hands of the Habs once the playoffs began. But let’s give a tip of the hat to Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper.   He, along with GM Steve Yzerman retooled and prepared their team which tonight completed a five-game sweep of the Canadiens in their 2014-’15 regular season series.

And they did it in dominating fashion.  Tampa outscored the Canadiens 21-8 while averaging more than 38 shots on goal against the Habs this season and yielding only 24 per game.

You may recall that recently Michel Therrien gruffly responded to a reporter’s question saying “Regarding systems and stuff like that, we’re not changing nothing.”  He might want to make an exception if the Canadiens meet the Bolts in the post-season.

In five games against the Lightning, the Canadiens number one centre, David Desharnais, registered just one assist. That was the same production as Montreal received from defenseman Jarred Tinordi, who played just one game.  Desharnais averaged just about 18 minutes of icetime per game against Tampa, including plenty pf power-play time.  In tonight’s game he didn’t register a shot on goal.

Alex Galchenyuk was pointless in the series.  Galchenyuk was better tonight with four shots on goal including ringing one off the crossbar in the third.

Size and speed work against the Lightning. Some of the best scoring chances came from Lars Eller and Jacob de la Rose. They cycled well and caused Tampa fits in front of the net. Now if they only had a winger.  Eller and de la Rose were split up in the third period when Therrien shook up all four lines.

Carey Price had another solid night with 40 saves in a game that was filled with odd-man rushes and prime scoring chances by the visitors.  In each of the four Tampa goals there was an absence of a defender between the goal scorer and Price.

P.K. Subban, scored his 14th goal of the season, but was on the ice for three Tampa goals.  In addition, Subban was the last player to the bench on a bad Canadiens line change that led to the first Lightning goal.

Greg Pateryn had five hits in the game but it was a hit in the third period with the score 3-2 that resulted in a Tampa 2-on-1 break and the second goal of the game for Vladislav Namestnikov.  The Bell Centre crowd was buzzing after solid contact by Eller up ice and the rookie defenseman simply got caught up in the moment and chased a hit at the wrong time.  It was a rare mistake but a game-changer.

▲     Lars Eller, Tomas Plekanec, Carey Price, Jeff Petry, Alex Galchenyuk

▼     P.K. Subban, Greg Pateryn, David Desharnais, Torrey Mitchell, Dale Weise, P.A. Parenteau, Brian Flynn, Michel Therrien

1.  Vladislav Namestnikov  TBL
2.  Ondrej Palat  TBL
3.  Jeff Petry  MTL

• “[Lack of discipline] took away all momentum that we needed to have. When you’re undisciplined, you don’t deserve to win. And I believe our group of defensemen really had a hard time.”

Max Pacioretty

• “They’re a hard working team. They’re well-coached, everyone has bought into that system and that’s why they have success. We’re the same way when we play well.  They’ll have their off games just like anyone else, but it seems like they’ve caught us on a lot of our off nights. We did show what we had in the third, but we need to do that for 60 minutes. It’s not enough to just show up for one period.”
• “In the playoffs we can’t afford to give teams breaks because they’ll make you pay. We have five games to get things ready for the playoffs. Obviously they had our number this season. We don’t play them again in the regular season, but if we see them in the playoffs, we know what we have to do to be better.”

Jeff Petry

• “Heading into the third, we knew what we needed to do. We could all look at ourselves in the room and know we didn’t have our game in the first two periods. A couple of guys spoke up and just said, ‘Those two periods are behind us and we need to fight back.”

Dale Weise

• “That’s a bad penalty (double minor) at a bad time. That’s totally my fault. No excuses.”

Lightning goalie Ben Bishop

• “Now we have an ‘X’ next to our name, which is nice. Now we have to keep trying to climb and catch these guys.”
• “It’s always good when you can beat a good team like that. Obviously (Carey) Price is arguably playing the best hockey right now, so whenever you can beat him five times that says a lot. Now we just need to have the effort we had (Monday) on a consistent basis.”

Lightning coach Jon Cooper

• “We had a will to win this hockey game.”
• “It’s highly doubtful we’ll see each other in the first round. So for us to sit here and say, ‘You know what? Did we exorcise some demons here from what happened last year?’ Sure we did. But, we can’t look at this and say, ‘Oh gee, we beat Montreal, all’s good.’ It’s just two more points we banked, we got into the playoffs. They’re going to go their way, we’re going to go our way, who knows maybe we’ll meet down the road. Now that would be special, if we did meet down the road.”
• “What happened in this building last year, we left here with a taste we all remember and for us to have a chance to [complete a five-game sweep], it’s pretty exciting.”