MONTREAL — Jake Evans didn’t hesitate to call the Colorado Avalanche the best team in the NHL after playing against them Saturday.
Just 10 minutes earlier, a scout who attended the game at the Bell Centre told Sportsnet what was clear to him was that Evans’s Montreal Canadiens are a team that “will out-compete anyone in the league right now,” after watching them erase a three-goal, third-period deficit before losing in the shootout to the mighty Avalanche.
This was a third consecutive game in which the Canadiens had staged a late comeback, but this one said something different about them. Because it’s one thing to do it against teams like the Ottawa Senators and New York Islanders, who are both contending for playoff spots down the stretch of this regular season, and it’s another to do it against an Avalanche team that’s revving up its engine for a redline run at the Stanley Cup.
How this comeback happened was something else entirely, too, with every Canadien punching back full force after getting walloped with haymakers through the first 20 minutes and pushed to the ropes through much of the next 20.
“We have a very confident group right now,” Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis said. “I found we came in waves in the third. It wasn’t just one line. We came in waves, and I think we gave them trouble.”
It’s the only way a team like the Canadiens can go toe to toe with an opponent like this one.
Sure, they beat the Avalanche in the shootout in December.
But this ain’t December, and these aren’t those Avs.
Yes, they had already redone their goaltending by then, with Mackenzie Blackwood and Scott Wedgewood replacing Justus Annanen and Alexandar Georgiev. But they subtracted Mikko Rantanen and added Martin Necas and Jack Drury in late January before subtracting Casey Middlestadt and adding Brock Nelson and Charlie Coyle up front, and Ryan Lindgren and Erik Johnson on the back end ahead of the deadline.
“I mean, they were kind of a one-line team for most the year,” said Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki, who lauded the work general manager Chris MacFarland to turn the Avalanche into a four-line juggernaut that could still get captain Gabriel Landeskog back and will get Samuel Girard and Josh Manson back for the playoffs.
Suzuki wasn’t about to suggest his Canadiens were no match for them on paper, but we will.
That’s what made what happened on the ice so noteworthy.
Because the Avalanche looked every bit as good there through the first half of the game as they do on paper — as the Canadiens stumbled in execution and fed their lethal transition time and time again — but the Canadiens never wilted. They fought back and wrestled control, like six-foot-three, 238-pound Arber Xhekaj did in pounding six-foot-six, 240-pound Keaton Middleton. What they reaffirmed to themselves in the process was that they could rely on their unheralded depth to come through in the clutch against any opponent that would be considered markedly better than them on paper.
That was valuable, because if the Canadiens make the playoffs, they’re guaranteed to face a team markedly better than them on paper, and they have shown they will not cower from that challenge.
“We believe, in here, that we can play against anyone,” said Juraj Slafkovsky, who scored two of Montreal’s goals. “That’s how we went into the game, and that’s how our mindset was through the whole (65 minutes and the shootout).”
It wasn’t just him, Suzuki and Cole Caufield. It was everyone on the Canadiens, and that’s what it had to be against these Avs.
Joshua Roy scored the goal that got Montreal back in the game 9:24 into the third. Slafkovsky’s second came exactly 30 seconds later. And over the four minutes before Christian Dvorak completed a brilliant pass from Brendan Gallagher facilitated by Emil Heineman’s forecheck, Lane Hutson drilled the crossbar, Caufield hit the post, and Mike Matheson came oh-so-close to slipping one through Blackwood’s pads.
Matheson and partner Alex Carrier finished a combined plus-3, playing close to 85 per cent of their five-on-five minutes against Colorado’s top line of Jonathan Drouin, Nathan MacKinnon and Valeri Nichushkin, and he was on the ice for the entirety of Montreal’s penalty kill in overtime.
That’s when goaltender Samuel Montembeault made multiple saves on MacKinnon and superstar defenceman Cale Makar.
Montembeault came up with one more huge one on MacKinnon in the shootout but was beat by Coyle before that, and beat by Nelson for the winner.
Still, it was a resilient performance from the goaltender after an admittedly tough one in an overtime loss to the Islanders Thursday.
Montembeault battled, and so did the Canadiens — not only after going down 3-0 when Necas scored in the sixth minute of the second but also after Nelson scored what appeared to be a backbreaker in the fourth minute of the third.
The Avalanche still improved their record to 6-1-1 since the trade deadline, and they look like they’re getting ready to push their game to an even higher level ahead of the playoffs.
The Canadiens have been playing at their highest one since coming out of the 4 Nations Break on Feb. 22.
The only team that’s posted a better points percentage (76.9) since is the St. Louis Blues (80), and that might give the Blues the edge on paper come Tuesday.
But the Canadiens have shown on the ice that no team will out-compete them right now.
