MONTREAL — Braydon Coburn smirked. He had just taken a cross-check and four gloved rights to the face from Brandon Prust, but he refused to take the bait.
“That’s what the playoffs are all about,” Coburn said afterwards. “Take one for the team.”
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One team kept its composure on Sunday and now has a strong grip on this second-round series. The other put its season in jeopardy by suffering a complete mental meltdown in a 6-2 loss.
The biggest offender was Prust, the Montreal Canadiens agitator, who started a parade to the penalty box with a double-minor in the first period. The first call was for roughing up Coburn and the second was for unsportsmanlike conduct after some words were exchanged with referee Brad Watson.
However, according to Prust, the conversation was basically one-way and it was Watson doing most of the talking.
“I thought the original call was kind of soft and I let him know on the way to the penalty box,” said Prust. “He kept provoking me. He came to the box and called me every name in the book. He called me a piece of you know what, a motherf—er, coward, said he’d drive me right out of this building.
“I kept going, ‘Yeah OK, yeah OK, yeah OK.’ He kept on me, he kept on me. I kept saying, ‘Yeah OK.’ I wasn’t looking at him. He teed me up. That’s the ref he is. He tries to play God. He tries to control the game and he did that tonight.”
What was hardest to reconcile about the lack of control on the Montreal bench is how promising the game began. The Habs once again came hard out of the gates and were rewarded with an early Jeff Petry goal on a seeing-eye wrist shot through a sea of sweaters.
Their aggressive forecheck was creating turnovers. At one point the shot clock read 11-4.
Then Prust took his double-minor and P.K. Subban followed with three cross-checks across the back side of Ryan Callahan’s head and neck, and the Tampa Bay Lightning managed to tie the score by the intermission.
“Before we took some really, really bad penalties at the end of the first period, I thought we were perfect,” said Montreal coach Michel Therrien. “It’s simple: Undisciplined (play) cost us the game. This is unacceptable.”
Given that they had already dropped the series opener, it was incomprehensible. This may only have been Game 2, but it felt like a must-win for Montreal.
Yet in the second period you had Tom Gilbert cross-checking Tyler Johnson to the ice and Petry hammering Ondrej Palat behind the net even though the Lightning winger didn’t have the puck.
Not only did both plays result in penalties, but Tampa used clinical passing to carve up the Habs penalty kill and turn this game into a laugher. A team that had scored two power-play goals all playoffs wound up going 4-for-8 on the night.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Lightning captain Steven Stamkos ended a personal nine-game goal drought — the longest since his rookie season — by beating Carey Price on a breakaway with a beautiful forehand deke.
“I don’t know if it was more relief for me that he scored or the power play scored,” deadpanned coach Jon Cooper. “So it was kind of a whole combination of Alka-Seltzer.”
Having cured what ails them, the Lightning are starting to look like the Cup contender many believe them to be. It’s certainly tough to imagine Montreal finding a way to win four of the next five games, after losing all seven meetings so far this season.
The team will have two off-days before playing back-to-back at Amelie Arena on Wednesday and Thursday.
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Some tough questions will need to be asked during the extended break. Such as: How, at this critical juncture of the season, did they let the moment get the best of them?
“I’m thinking we pissed the game away,” said Habs winger Max Pacioretty. “Great start, our building, got the fans into it, go up 1-0, we pissed the game away.”
You could just feel the confidence inside the visitor’s dressing room as the Lightning packed up their things. They believe they’ve gotten inside their opponent’s mind, and under their skin.
Prust’s less-than-stellar evening ended with less than two minutes to play in regulation when he tripped Tampa goalie Ben Bishop behind the net and then fought Coburn. As he skated off the ice, he threw his elbow pad onto the Lightning bench — only to see Stamkos calmly toss it into the stands.
“I definitely didn’t expect that coming,” said Stamkos. “I mean, he’s a fiery guy, he’s a competitor, for the most part he plays behind the lines. That’s twice he’s run our goalie now.
“That’s frustration on their part.”
Earlier in the day, Cooper spoke about how the home team often feels more pressure in the playoffs. We’ll see if that holds.
The Canadiens must find a way to win at least one game in the NHL’s toughest road building or it will have already played its last game at Bell Centre this season.
And if this was it in Montreal for 2014-15, it was no way to go out.
