Montreal Canadiens: Injury to Jeff Petry Would Be Devastating to Habs

The Montreal Canadiens took a commanding three games to zero lead in their second round series with the Winnipeg Jets last night, but the news wasn’t all good.

Jeff Petry injured himself on an odd play in the second period and missed much of the second half of the game.

There was no announcement about his status and head coach Dominique Ducharme said after the game that there was no update and we would know more in the morning when he had a chance to be re-assessed.

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While we don’t know the extent of Petry’s injury, one thing is for certain: a lengthy stint on the injured reserve would be crushing to the team’s hopes of going much further in the postseason. Up 3-0 in the current series, the Habs would still have a terrific chance of moving on without Petry, but their odds of winning a third series are almost nil without their two-way defender.

Petry injured his hand or finger on an awkward play where he was along the boards and got his glove stuck in the hole in the glass where cameras look through to take pictures of the players on the ice.

The Canadiens are set to play the winner of the Vegas Golden Knights and Colorado Avalanche series, assuming they can beat the Jets one more time with four opportunities to do so. The Avs are without defenceman Erik Johnson who missed most of the season with a concussion, but they are still able to rely on Cale Makar, Devon Toews, Sam Girard and Ryan Graves to make up a terrific top four.

The Canadiens are already scrambling to try and find a fifth defender they can trust to play more than ten minutes per game. Ben Chiarot, Shea Weber, Joel Edmundson and Petry are all averaging 22 minutes per game or more, but Jon Merrill, Brett Kulak and Erik Gustafsson have not earned the coaches trust enough to play consistently.

Petry had a terrific season for the Canadiens, scoring 12 goals and 42 points in 55 games which put him second on the Habs in scoring and seventh among blue liners in points in the NHL.

Taking Petry out would leave the Habs with a top pairing of Chiarot and Weber and then a second pairing of Edmundson with Kulak playing his off side. You would expect Alexander Romanov to feature prominently in Petry’s absence, but he hasn’t played a single postseason game yet, sitting in the press box watching Gustafsson play somewhere between six and ten minutes each of the past six games.

We are forced to wait and speculate the “what ifs” until we hear official news on Petry. However, it is going to take an enormous upset from this team to make it to the Stanley Cup Finals, and that just won’t be possible without the presence of Jeff Petry.