Canadiens answer embarrassing loss with ‘best game of the season’

The sequence continued with Joe Veleno sucking Mattias Ekholm into a trap to start a cycle and ended with him burying his second goal of the season and Montreal’s second goal of what turned out to be a 4-1 win over the Edmonton Oilers.

Everything that happened in the lead-up to it was the stuff this game was made of for the Canadiens.

When Veleno intercepted a forced pass from Connor McDavid and ripped a shot past Calvin Pickard, it capped a 57-second shift that spanned all 200 feet of the ice. He, Jake Evans and Josh Anderson lost a faceoff after icing the puck, and after defending like the game was on the line, they pushed the play up the ice and forced the world’s best player and his linemates to defend until they broke.

The whole sequence required attention to detail, intensity, and the type of persistence the Canadiens just haven’t had often enough for the better part of six weeks. 

They had it on this shift, though, after re-establishing it at the start of Sunday’s game, and they maintained it until the final whistle blew.

“It was our best game of the season,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis.

It wasn’t a coincidence the Canadiens conjured it up directly after playing arguably their sloppiest game of the season—a 5-4 loss to the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden 24 hours prior, over which they surrendered 3-0 and 4-2 leads.

“Marty was obviously really pissed,” Veleno said.

We wondered if he and the rest of the players were, too, and felt they needed a long, hard look in the mirror if they weren’t. Because Saturday’s game wasn’t a throwaway; it was a game that provided a critical lesson to a young, stubborn team searching for—and failing to find—consistency.

“It’s about, as a team, playing more desperate, playing like it’s the playoffs right now,” said Jake Evans, and he was right.

But it wouldn’t have made a difference if he were the only one to realize it.

Because he wasn’t, we got something vastly different Sunday from what we’ve watched over an up-and-mostly-down, topsy-but-mostly-turvy run of play that put the Canadiens’ character, system and coach on trial in the court of public opinion and undid a lot of the good that felt solidified through a 9-3-0 start.

Hey, this was never going to be a straightaway for the youngest team in the league. And more bumps and bends in the road are surely coming.

But the Canadiens all steadying the bus together Sunday gave them a roadmap to navigating those bumps and bends better when they come.

“I don’t think anything is linear in life,” said St. Louis. “If it teaches us anything, this non-linear thing, I think it’s when you have 20 guys that take care of the team, I think the dips are (shallower) and you rise faster.”

It’s a commitment that must be made over and over again, and it’s anything but easy to do this far from the finish line. As St. Louis always says, deadlines spur urgency, and the deadline is still 50 games away.

But Games 31 and 32 set off alarm bells right when the Canadiens needed to wake up. The embarrassment of Saturday’s game, and the threat of embarrassment on Sunday rang loud and clear to all.

“I think sometimes it takes playing against the best players to understand you need to play that way, because then you play more with the awareness that they can do something very bad to you,” said Veleno. 

Playing “that way” meant playing simple and smart, playing direct and connected, playing intensely and relentlessly, and managing each situation the way it needed to be managed.

The Canadiens did that at the start. 

Then they took two penalties on the same sequence and fought like hell to kill a five-on-three they’d have not survived if not for the five saves Jakub Dobes made.

The Canadiens fed off the momentum Dobes gave them until Ivan Demidov broke the ice on their power play 2:28 into the second period. And then they broke the Oilers down methodically and systematically to create three breakaway chances and much more momentum for Veleno to capitalize on.

“We frustrated them just by being good defensively, being on the right side of the puck, winning battles and forcing them to give up pucks,” he said. “Teams get annoyed when you take away their time and space, and we annoyed them.”

It was Evans, Anderson, Matheson and Carrier who annoyed McDavid all night, limiting him to a measly secondary assist on the power play in the 13^th minute of the third period, long after Nick Suzuki made it 3-0 Canadiens.

The playoff intensity Evans demanded was there from start to finish.

“I definitely saw it tonight,” he said. “I thought that was one of our most complete games. Just simple plays. You’re up a couple of goals against a really skilled team that’ll make you pay quickly, and everyone chipped in. Literally. Everyone was literally chipping pucks in.”

It is the template a team must employ to win consistently in this league, with the schedule unrelenting and the standings airtight.

Relying on skill—even if you have enough of it—rarely works, and games like the ones against New York and Edmonton should reinforce that lesson to the Canadiens.

“Tonight was very encouraging, and I feel like if we do that, you’re helping yourself to be consistent,” said St. Louis. “And when you have consistency, you’re going to get home runs, you’re going to keep climbing in the standings. If you lack consistency, you’re just rolling the dice.”

That reality appeared to finally be acknowledged by the Canadiens on Sunday, and that enabled them to grow a little bit.

We’ll find out exactly how much by Tuesday, when they face the Philadelphia Flyers.