CANADIENS
Montreal

PENGUINS
Pittsburgh

Game Notes:

Defensive zone coverage.  It’s called own-zone for a reason. The Canadiens should be owning the puck in the defensive zone. And they haven’t for some time. Allowing easy entries and uncontested puck possession by the opposition has been a lazy pattern of play masked by exceptional goaltending. But against the best teams in the league, it’s not a formula for success.

Hamilton calling. Despite season-long poor defensive play, supporters of Nathan Beaulieu pointed to his good first pass.  On Tuesday, Beaulieu connected with Pittsburgh forward Beau Bennett for the Penguins first goal putting his team in a hole early in the game.  Before the ten minute mark of the first period, poor defensive coverage by Beaulieu and his defensive mate Tom Gilbert resulted in the second Pittsburgh goal. At that point Beaulieu and Gilbert were minus-2 not even halfway through the first.  Gilbert was on the ice for all four Penguins goals.  Beaulieu could benefit from significant time in Hamilton to learn to read offenses.

Not fixed. After the power-play going 3-for-a-zillion this season, Sergei Gonchar arrived via trade from Dallas. Against, Philly the power-play was 3-for-3. Gonchar was the remedy and Marc Bergevin was a genius. Well, not so fast. It appears that the Flyers worst penalty-kill in the league, including a 52 percent road rating had more to do with a perfect night by the Canadiens on Saturday.  Since then, Montreal has gone 0-for-7 and look to have the same previously-diagnosed problems.  While Michel Therrien is open to making changes on the backend — P.K. Subban and Tom Gilbert started the first wave — the coach is stubbornly reluctant to making changes to significantly restrict David Desharnais‘ power-play time despite his ineptness going back to last season.

Possession is not everything. The Canadiens dominated the faceoff circle 40-25. Lars Eller led the team with a 75 per cent success rate. Only Desharnais failed to win more faceoffs than he lost. But Montreal could not turn the advantage into scoring chances with the Penguins defensive system constantly disrupting the flow. Jiri Sekac had some of the best opportunities for the Habs.

Plus / Minus

▲   Brendan Gallagher, Tomas Plekanec, Lars Eller, Alex Galchenyuk, Andrei Markov, Alexei Emelin

▼   Nathan Beaulieu, Tom Gilbert, David Desharnais

1.  Beau Bennett  PIT 
2.  Steve Downie  PIT
3.  Marc-Andre Fleury  PIT

• “We did some good things, no doubt about that. We made some huge mistakes, turned the puck over on the first goal, bad coverage on the second goal. … It reminds you that you have to be humble. And we still have a lot of work in front of us if we want to compare ourselves with big teams like that.”
• “We had a bad start, and you can’t play from behind against a team like that. They’re a team that’s given up the least amount of goals in the NHL. They played very well defensively.  It’s a game where we lost momentum from the start. They managed to hurt us on a turnover that should never have happened. Then, there was some bad coverage on the second goal. But, it’s also the type of game that provides us with a good dose of humility. It puts things in perspective. When you’re going up against a team like the Penguins, you realize that there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

Max Pacioretty

• “It seems like that’s the way these streaks normally end, with a bang like that. It’s a bad feeling, especially when we knew that this was going to be a big statement game. A good team like this came into our building while we were hot, and we weren’t able to be up for the task. I think the intentions were there most of the time, but the execution was very poor. I think a lot of it was maybe trying to do too much, especially early on. Instead of just keeping things simple, keeping the puck going forward and getting pucks behind the defensemen, we didn’t do that and they really made us pay.”

P.K. Subban

• “I think in these types of games you’re better off keeping it simple [rather] than trying to do too much. And I think at times we maybe we got overzealous and we tried to do too many things at their blue line instead of keeping it simple, putting the puck in the right places and grinding them down. But I felt as the game went on we started to get more and more confidence, but when you’re behind the 8-ball against a team like this they lock it up pretty tight.”

Penguins coach Mike Johnston

• “We really wanted to challenge our guys coming into this game because we knew how good Montreal was with their transition game and I felt we had to be really good defensively. We had to be great on the backcheck, be above on our forecheck, and I thought we were good from start to finish.”
• “I thought we played a really comfortable game defensively and then we took our chances when we had them. We didn’t force anything but our transition game was good, our down-low play was good, and then our power play converted, so putting them back on their heels early in the game was important.”