CANADIENS
Montreal

RANGERS
New York

Lineup

Forward lines and defense pairings 

[one_half]Pacioretty – Danault – Radulov
Byron – Plekanec – Gallagher
Lehkonen – Galchenyuk – Shaw
King – Ott – Mitchell
[/one_half]

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

Goaltenders

Price
Montoya

Scratches

Brian Flynn, Michael McCarron, Andreas Martinsen, Brandon Davidson, Nikita Nesterov

Injured Reserve

Game Report

Your Canadiens are in trouble. Big trouble. They have lost two of three games at the Bell Centre and may not get a chance for another one.

The Habs are capable of winning on Saturday at Madison Square Garden bringing the series back to Montreal for a Game 7. But given what we saw on Thursday night, that task will be very difficult.

The Canadiens played a strong first period that was spoiled only by the weak play of Nathan Beaulieu leading to a shorthanded goal for the Rangers. The second period was more evenly played with New York tying the score with 1:32 left. This one seemed to sting, both the players and fans.

There was a decided lack of energy and pace in the third period. In overtime, the Canadiens look gassed and the Rangers dominated. It was only a matter of time.

Post-game fans were looking for scapegoats. Many stupidly pointed at Number 31. Fool’s logic says that Habs inability to consistently generate scoring chances means that Henrik Lundqvist is outplaying Carey Price. That’s nonsense.

If the Canadiens are unable to get past the Rangers in the first round, much of the attention will be focused on Marc Bergevin who has failed to improve Montreal’s top six. But now, the players in the lineup will have to elevate their games if they hope to extend this first round series.

~~~

▲     Carey Price, Shea Weber, Andrei Markov, Artturi Lehkonen, Brendan Gallagher, Tomas Plekanec, Steve Ott

▼     Nathan Beaulieu, Jordie Benn, Alex Galchenyuk

1.  Mika Zibanejad  NYR
2.  Brendan Gallagher  MTL
3.  Henrik Lunqvist  NYR

• “If I didn’t have confidence in my team, I’d have no business being here. I believe in this team because they’ve showed that they can come from behind. Now’s their chance to show it again.”
• “To overcome this [deficit], we’ll need more from a lot of guys. Now’s the time to stand up and take our game up a notch, be confident and have the desire to win.  When you lose a game and you’re down 3-2, you can’t be satisfied as a team. We know that certain guys can give us more and we’re hoping that will happen.”

Brendan Gallagher

• “We’re going into a situation here where we’re going to learn a lot about our group. We’re going to learn the type of character we have. If you don’t have character, this is the time where you’re going to doubt yourself. If you have character, this is the time where the belief is going to come out of your group. We’ll see what we have, but I’m pretty confident in the guys we have here.”

Max Pacioretty

• “Just worry about one game at a time. We’ve got to tune out all this noise. There’s nothing really we can do about this now. We’ve got to be disappointed that it was an opportunity blown, but excited at a big challenge that we can show our character here.”

Quotes courtesy of NHL.com