WASHINGTON, D.C. — A season of bending finally broke the Montreal Canadiens in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and then there was pain.
It hurts but also hardens, which is exactly what these Canadiens need from it at this moment.
They were the youngest entrant to this tournament since the 1970s, coming in hungry for wins and absolutely starving for the type of experience only playoff hockey could deliver, and they got fed — huge hits and drastic momentum swings leading to emotional highs and lows that provided valuable lessons.
That doesn’t make a 4-1 series loss to the Washington Capitals easy to digest. Nor should it if it’s truly going to bring the Canadiens to where they aim to go in their rebuild.
They need this to hurt because, as coach Martin St. Louis said after this final game of the series was lost 4-1 at Capital One Arena, “The pain you feel right now is not even close to the joy that’s coming.”
That pain will be formative.
Mike Matheson knows.
Prior to playing 22:05 in Game 5, he talked about the process teams go through to become champions in this league.
“Everyone wants to get to that ultimate goal of winning the Stanley Cup and there’s a realization that you can’t just kind of end up there (in) one year,” the 31-year-old said. “You have to keep pushing every single year and taking every chance that you get to try to make it happen.”
There is no winning without losing first.
Ask the Tampa Bay Lightning, who lost over and over before winning back-to-back Cups in 2020 and 2021.
Or ask Alex Ovechkin and John Carlson, who were labeled perennial losers before leading the Capitals to a Cup win in 2018.
Now think about what’s happened since in Washington.
“We haven’t won a series since 2018,” said coach Spencer Carbery. “Seven years it’s been since we’ve won a series, and we’ve been good teams.”
Go back another eight years from 2018, when the Capitals lost in the first round to a veteran Canadiens team that came out of nowhere. That team was a juggernaut, overflowing with young talent, showing the hockey world it would keep fighting until it could finally win.
The thought that this current version of the Canadiens is embarking on a similar process became a lot more tangible over the past nine days — and not just to us.
“I think I gained a lot of respect for that team over there,” said Capitals energy source Tom Wilson. “You know, they’ve got a bright future, obviously. And they competed really hard, and they’ve got a bunch a warriors.”
One of them, David Savard, played his last game in the NHL on Wednesday, opting to hang up his skates after first lacing them up in the league 16 years ago.
Along the way, he blocked 1,765 shots in the regular season and post-season combined, hoisted the Cup with the Lightning, and earned universal respect from his opponents — including the Capitals, who all spent extra time with him in the handshake line following Wednesday’s game.
The Canadiens lined up to hug Savard before leaving the ice.
He left the game on his own terms and left the Canadiens with the seeds of a winning culture.
“He’s a guy that puts in the work every single day and earns his respect, and every single guy — not just the D-men — that got to the play with him is way better off going forward in their career,” said Brendan Gallagher. “He just does things the right way, and those guys aren’t around that much.
“This locker room was very fortunate to have a guy like that.”
Savard left his legacy, and young defencemen Kaiden Guhle, Lane Hutson, Jayden Struble and Arber Xhekaj will carry it forward.
Alex Carrier will be there to help, like he was in Game 5.
Not even two devastating hits in Game 4 — from Wilson and Ovechkin — could keep him from playing.
“Everyone was dealing with something,” Carrier said after playing 31 inspiring shifts on Wednesday.
Gallagher played through a broken rib, Josh Anderson suffered a knee injury in December and had several other ailments he fought through just to keep pushing the Canadiens, and the extent of other injuries will be revealed by this weekend.
But none of them stopped the Canadiens from making this a series Carbery said probably shouldn’t have been decided in as few as five games.
The Canadiens understood that’s what it would take to have a chance.
“You don’t have a choice, it’s the price to pay,” said St. Louis. “You need full pockets to go pay the price, and that’s what we had.”
The Canadiens emptied them and suffered for it.
There will be time to heal. The pain will dissipate. The clouds will clear. And it sure feels like the sun is about to rise over this team.
Captain Nick Suzuki is 25 and signed for less than $8 million per for five more years, with the salary cap expected to grow exponentially over that time. Cole Caufield, Juraj Slakovsky, Ivan Demidov and Hutson — who rounded out the dangerous top unit of Montreal’s power play over the final three games of the series—are all younger and signed for less.
Carbery started talking about Suzuki, Caufield and Slafkovsky at five-on-five by referencing Nikita Kucherov and Brayden Point coming up with the Lightning.
“You would have to set a whole game plan against that line,” he said.
What we took from that was that the coach wasn’t just pointing to uber-talented players but also to champions.
And he was so effusive in his praise of the Canadiens as a whole that he spoke for nearly four minutes straight about where he thinks they’re heading.
“Now you’re just imagining — I don’t even want to go to that place — the next 10 years of having to deal with that,” Carbery said.
“Then you’ve got the Demidov kid coming…” he added. “They have a bright future…”
You can’t blame the players in the Canadiens’ locker room for feeling as though what they were doing in the present was cut too short.
Outside of that room, people said they were playing with house money just making it to the playoffs. But the Canadiens never felt that way.
And they finished the series feeling like they left money on the table, and that’s as important as anything they experienced this season.
It should continue to drive the Canadiens forward, which is the direction they’ve been going since this rebuild began.
“Last couple of years, we’ve understood our identity,” said Gallagher. “I think we’ve created that as a group, and we play to it. When we have success, I think that’s what other teams will understand is, ‘This is what the Montreal Canadiens are going to do to us.’ And that’s important to have. And I think there’s been accountability within our team. We hold each other to that standard. When we talk to you guys at the start of the year and we say this is our goal, we mean it. And this is where we want to be, and next year’s going to be no different. There’s opportunity to get back here, and it’s going to get tougher, so it’s important for us to continue to add to that. But it’s a resilient group, a group that continues to fight for each other, and when we play to our identity we’re a good hockey club.”
The Canadiens pushed through a lot of pain to prove that this season.
“If we introduced ourselves to rest of the league through these playoffs,” said St. Louis, “we can walk out of here with our head held high.”
Bones were broken and egos were bruised, but the Canadiens will come back stronger.
