MONTREAL — It was a fifth straight win for the Montreal Canadiens, and how it was earned had better reinforce the lesson this team has already been served too many times this season.
“You start feeling comfortable in this league,” said captain Nick Suzuki, “and it’ll come right back at you.”
Considering how things had gone for the Canadiens through the first 60 games, you’d have thought they already knew.
They put themselves in the least comfortable position possible by losing 13 of their first 17 games. Then they won 19 of their next 30 games and kicked their feet up, only to have them knocked right off the table by their competition, which beat them in eight of nine games leading up to the 4 Nations Face-Off break. And they shouldn’t have been settling back into the recliner after rattling off four wins and earning a 3-0 lead in this fifth one, which inevitably put them one point back of a playoff spot.
The Canadiens want to keep playing meaningful games from here to the end. They want to keep progressing. They want to make the playoffs.
But they must know none of those things are going to happen if they don’t find a better balance between games — and within them.
Monday’s game needs to be the last of its kind for this team between now and mid-April.
The Canadiens were up in the clouds after Juraj Slafkovsky made it 3-0 against the Buffalo Sabres in the 14th minute of play. They nearly came crashing down through the ice by the time they allowed the tying goal with 1:01 to go in the third. Ultimately, they were lucky Mike Matheson cushioned their landing by scoring the winner 1:21 into overtime.
He knows they were lucky.
“After the first, we went from trying to win the game to trying not to lose it,” Matheson said.
Earlier in the day, he talked about how the Canadiens have grown this season by recalibrating faster to reassert themselves when they start to slip.
“Earlier on, we’d let it bleed for too long,” Matheson said. “But we’ve done a much better job of resetting and finding our game again.”
But against the Sabres, the Canadiens did the opposite of that. They let the Sabres take over for 45 minutes between their third goal and Matheson’s game-winner, and they can’t allow the result to blur how fortunate they were to come out on top.
The Canadiens can’t afford to play any of their remaining 21 games that way.
“We have to understand the games, in general, are going to become tighter and that we need to be more precise, more calculated, more opportunistic. Our goaltenders are going to have to make bigger saves, our special teams are going to have to be there,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis. “These are all things that’ll be important, and we’re trying to check each box. We’d be delusional if we thought we’d be perfect in all that until the end of the year, but we have to find a way to win.”
What the Canadiens need to find is consistency in their effort and focus from shift to shift and game to game.
They’re fortunate to be still standing on the peak at this moment and can’t afford to fall back into another deep valley, and a performance like Monday’s could push them into it if they don’t process it properly.
Cole Caufield, who scored his 30th goal in the game, said the Canadiens just have to take things one game at time.
Suzuki, who put up four points to give him 13 over this five-game run, said that even though it’s hard to do as a team that’s “pretty process-driven,” the Canadiens should just run with the two points.
But as St. Louis said, the Canadiens can’t afford to just put this game away without taking meaning from it.
He has overseen all the dramatic highs and lows this season and doesn’t want to see more from here to the end.
“I think we’ve just got to be more demanding of each other. We’ve got to be more accountable to each other,” he said. “I’ve learned, too, as a coach going through this. I think I’m better prepared now when I see that next one coming maybe, for which we don’t have time. It’s very important that we don’t go on these (long winning stretches followed by long losing stretches). We can’t do that right now. The clock’s ticking. We’ve got to play hard. I’ve got to coach hard. We’ve got to be engaged.”
If the Canadiens can do that consistently in a way they haven’t yet this season, it’ll be a big leap among several small steps forward they’ve taken.
