Ah. The best time of the year. The Montreal Canadiens lost one game in the playoffs and the sky is falling. And now its our job to help console the knee jerk reactionaries saying that the Habs are done for after just one game. I am sure that I don’t need to remind everyone that Montreal lost the first game of the last series against Vegas. But, also, Tampa Bay also lost the first game of their Stanley Cup winning series last year.
It is much to early to tell, and Montreal is only one game behind in the series. At the same time, it is not the best position to be in, and I am sure that all Canadiens fans would have preferred the team to play better and have won the game. But it wasn’t all bad.
At the end of the first period it was 1-0 Lightning. By the end of the second it was 2-1. Those are both winnable games for Montreal, within striking distance at least. Definitely not the blowout that some people are purporting it to be. After the 3-1 goal, Montreal lost their composure as the game was seemingly out of reach at that point, and a lot of goals went in that probably shouldn’t have, and the Stamkos goal came in the definition of garbage time.
But just looking at the stats doesn’t tell the entire story. Just because Montreal lost 5-1 doesn’t mean that the entire team was terrible, or even bad. For that, we have to look at this thing line for line and see who did good, who did bad, and what everyone could do better.