CANADIENS
Montreal

PANTHERS
Florida

Lineup

Forward lines and defense pairings 

[one_half]Byron – Galchenyuk – Gallagher
Pacioretty – Danault – Shaw
Andrighetto – Plekanec – Desharnais
Carr – Mitchell- Terry[/one_half]

[one_half_last]Emelin – Weber
Markov – Petry
Beaulieu – Pateryn
[/one_half_last]

Goaltenders

Price
Montoya

Scratches

Brian Flynn (upper body), Alexander Radulov, Joel Hanley

Injured Reserve

Zach Redmond, Artturi Lehkonen

Game Report

Call it a bad break or getting a taste of their own goaltending medicine. Whatever your preference, it was a streak busting game for Carey Price and the Canadiens.

It is fair to say that, once again, the Habs looked unprepared and not ready to start this game. The Canadiens came out flat, the Panthers didn’t, resulting in a 12-6 advantage in shots and a 2-1 lead on the scoreboard for the visitors after the opening 20 minutes.

Montreal did wake up in the second period peppering Roberto Luongo with 21 shots alone in the middle frame. But the home team failed to take control of the game.

Given the way Price has carried this team on his back for most of the season, he couldn’t be faulted for having an average performance. Much more impactful on the outcome was the absence of Alexander Radulov, who was missing from the lineup with a virus. Despite the juggling of Michel Therrien, he could not find the successful formula.

Phillip Danault certainly has become a media darling early in this season. He is off to an excellent start offensively helping to provide secondary scoring. But the same can’t be said about his defensive game. Coming into Tuesday night’s game, Danault was dead last among Habs forwards in goals against per 60 minutes.

The stat wasn’t improved against the Panthers as Danault was on the ice for three of the Panthers goals including the game-winner in overtime. Danault finished the game at minus-3. Promoting the 23-year-old to the second line centre role was obviously premature.

The Canadiens struggling veterans, Brendan Gallagher, Max Pacioretty and Tomas Plekanec were better but not quite where they need to be yet. Pacioretty rifled a a wicked wrister on the power-play to open the scoring. On the other end of the spectrum, Andrei Markov is quietly having an excellent season. No one makes the kind of passes he can and that was certainly evident on the Habs second goal.

Therrien adores his bottom six players and he loves to elevate them well-beyond their talents. When it works, it seems like magic and those are the stories that are repeated ad nauseam as if they are the rule. Tonight was a prime example of when sprinkling fourth line players through the line-up had predictable results.

~~~

▲     Max Pacioretty, Chris Terry, Andrei Markov, Daniel Carr, Paul Byron

▼     Phillip Danault, Andrew Shaw, Nathan Beaulieu, Greg Pateryn

1.  Aaron Ekblad  FLA
2.  David Desharnais  MTL
3.  Michael Matheson  FLA

Brendan Gallagher

• “Tonight I felt like I had a couple of chances. I was around the net, I had some more shots.”
• “You want to contribute. For me, I don’t look at goals and assists. I look at ability to create offensive-zone chances and eventually the goals and stuff will take care of itself.”
• “One of the things I think we’ve done a good job of is, win or lose, the next day at the rink our mentality has been the same. You think about this one for a couple of hours and then you’re focusing on the next one. We just have to regroup, we have a lot of hockey coming up here.”

Max Pacioretty

• “It could have gone either way. I think we played alright. It was good to come back. We didn’t show our best in the first, but we battled in the second and came back to get the point and force it to overtime. Obviously, we would have liked to have a better fate, but it was a pretty good effort, I think.”
• “We’ve gotten a lot of bounces to go our way. Those things even out as the season goes on. There are 82 games, so to use a word like “frustrated” right now wouldn’t make sense.”

Quotes courtesy of NHL.com