The Montreal Canadiens hosted Tampa Bay in a must-win game for the Canadiens. This game recap takes a closer look at how the Canadiens pulled out the win.
The league-leading Tampa Bay Lightning rolled into Montreal Tuesday night for a date with the Montreal Canadiens. In a desperate need for points, Montreal took care of business on home ice with a 4-2 victory on home ice. In today’s Josh’s Take, I take a look at what happened last night, how the team played, who was on and who was off and give an outlook to tomorrow night’s game in Washington.
Anytime Tampa rolls into Montreal you know it is going to be an entertaining game and no matter how terrifying that team is to play against, and the Montreal Canadiens have done a good job playing them in the past and last night’s game was another prime example of that. My God what a game!
The Montreal Canadiens came out of the gate flying in the first period. The Canadiens were clearly the better team in the first period, but it was Steven Stamkos that scored the first goal of the game at 2:28 of the first period. A weak shot from behind the goal line that gets deflected in by Max Domi and it was 1-0 bad guys pretty quick.
As I sat in the stands watching last night, I told my friend Chris that the next goal was going to be the most important goal of the game. The Canadiens started the period the right way, they were playing with speed and were hard on the forecheck, but when a team that starts the period like that and they don’t get rewarded early sometimes doubt starts to set it. Couple that with the fact that Tampa showed they could score from anywhere, I really believed that if Montreal could get the next goal that they would be okay as long as they kept playing the way they were.