NEWARK, N.J. — Nearly everything favoured the Montreal Canadiens Thursday, except for the final score.
That’s why when New Jersey Devils coach Sheldon Keefe was asked for his assessment of his team’s 5-3 win at Prudential Center, he said, “I didn’t like a lot about the game, to be honest.”
At least there’s that for the Canadiens, who lost their fifth contest in a row.
There’s also this, which came from Canadiens centre Jake Evans: “I thought we played really well. That was our most complete game.”
He wasn’t celebrating it. He was just giving his assessment of a game that saw his team limit the Devils to just 20 shots and nine high-danger attempts at five-on-five.
You could debate whether wins over Ottawa, St. Louis and Philadelphia were better performances than this one in New Jersey, but that’s splitting hairs.
What matters is that Evans — and the Canadiens, according to head coach Martin St. Louis — were able to keep their performance in perspective after yet another devastating loss.
“Everyone’s asking me if I’m worried, but with how we’re playing, I’m not worried,” St. Louis said. “On the collective, I’m not worried at all.”
Panicking would solve nothing, and St. Louis is justified to be far less concerned about the way the Canadiens are playing now than he was about the way they were playing one week ago.
They started off this losing streak with two defensively porous games but have executed most of what they’ve specifically focused on over their last three. They’ve cleaned things up in their own end, and they’ve steadily built more offensive chances from game to game (from Saturday’s in Pittsburgh to Tuesday’s against the Flames in Montreal to Thursday’s in Newark), and it’s better for them to dwell on that rather than this outcome.
Not as a moral victory — we’ve already established those don’t matter this season — but as a security measure to keep a fragile psyche from completely fracturing.
“There’s 68 games to go,” said Evans.
He was suggesting the Canadiens’ 4-8-2 start is not necessarily a death knell for their season with 83 per cent of the games still to be played.
It was a more productive way of thinking about it than pondering how long the next few months might feel if the team even wallows in defeat when it plays well.
Neither Evans nor the Canadiens lied to themselves about how this went. They weren’t perfect against the Devils, and the players we spoke to — including Evans — admitted that.
But they also know the difference was they weren’t as opportunistic as the Devils.
There was no better example of that than when the Canadiens missed on three consecutive Grade-A scoring chances before Jack Hughes got one for the Devils and buried it, adding a goal to his two assists on the night to make it 4-2 for his team in the seventh minute of the third period.
Alex Newhook pushed with his second goal of the game less than two minutes later to get the Canadiens back to within one.
Then the officials missed an obvious interference call on Luke Hughes, who buried Brendan Gallagher in front of Devils goaltender Jacob Markstrom before Canadiens defenceman Mike Matheson was given a questionable penalty for hooking blueliner Brett Pesce.
Even the Devils thought they were the ones being penalized on the sequence.
It was a second gift they were given in the game.
They got one leading up to their third goal when the officials missed David Savard being tripped at the offensive blue line. It gave the Devils a three-on-one rush, which the Canadiens handled well before losing coverage of Jonas Sieganthaler on the second wave.
The missed call on Gallagher and made call on Matheson seized whatever momentum the Canadiens were building, and then Jesper Bratt scored into an empty net with 26 seconds to go.
“I felt we didn’t get much help, and we’ll leave it at that,” said St. Louis.
It was a fair comment, pertaining to the officials.
Still, the Canadiens got plenty of help from the Devils.
They exploited it on two plays — the goals Newhook scored while the Devils made inexcusably ill-timed line changes — but needed to on at least three more.
St. Louis said that came down to confidence being low for certain individuals.
He’ll work on building it back up with them.
As for the rest?
“The engagement and the work and the intentions are right where I want them to be,” St. Louis said. “We’re just not getting rewarded right now, and that’s okay. We’re just going to keep going and we’re going to try to find some answers for some players that are maybe fighting it, and we’re going to keep working on the collective game. But I think it’s in a good place.”
The Canadiens are in a bad one in the standings, looking up at 29 teams, tied with San Jose and only ahead of the Nashville Predators.
Beating themselves up after this game against the Devils wouldn’t help.
