OTTAWA — The Montreal Canadiens are going to have nights like these.
Nights where they jump out of the gate and establish a lead they shouldn’t squander, and then execution falls by the wayside and the game is left to Carey Price to make the difference.
On Saturday, Price was chasing history, trying to tie Patrick Roy for second all-time in wins for a Canadiens goaltender. He started the game with a brilliant save on Mikkel Boedker from in tight and ended it fishing the puck out of his net after a one-timer from Mark Stone beat him high over the glove to give the Ottawa Senators a 4-3 win.
“He’s a good player, he shoots the puck well and he was in a good spot,” said Price afterwards. “You have to give him credit for that one.”
No doubt about it.
There was nothing for Price to do about Stone’s laser, which pinged off the crossbar and found the back of the net. Nothing to do about Stone’s first goal of the game, either, with Canadiens defenceman Karl Alzner coughing up a puck to Stone behind the net and a three-way passing play eventually finding his stick for a tap-in.
And Matt Duchene’s second-period power-play marker, to tie the game 3-3 with 7:59 to play in the frame, was giftwrapped by Bobby Ryan, leaving Price scrambling with just a prayer to get his blocker on the puck.
But when Boedker started the comeback from 3-1 down with a harmless rush to the outside and a shot from the goal line, it was the type of goal Price at his best doesn’t allow. The type of goal he shouldn’t allow, even when he’s off by a fraction.
“When you guess, that’s when you’re in trouble,” Price had said a few days ago following a game in Montreal.
He guessed big-time on the Boedker goal, throwing a pre-emptive poke check at him that missed and left the top half of the short side of his net exposed.
Price rallied in the third period, with his best save coming on a Chris Tierney one-timer.
He charged out on the rebound and challenged Stone enough to force a shot into the crossbar, and he scrambled back to cover the puck after Alzner made a goal-line stop on the rebound.
With just under eight minutes remaining in regulation, Senators forward Colin White stormed in on a partial breakaway that Canadiens defenceman Mike Reilly disturbed on the backcheck.
The puck still caromed off of White’s stick and forced Price to make a good save. He froze the rebound. Crisis averted.
And Price made a solid save on Tierney in overtime, when the Senators forward got a breakaway and shot a change-up that could have beaten him and made him look foolish.
He finished with 30 saves. It’s not as if the Canadiens lost because of him.
“I think in the first period we wanted to have a good start and we did,” said Canadiens coach Claude Julien. “I thought our first period was a good first and all of a sudden in the second period we got away from our game. Our execution, a lot of unforced errors, I think we ended up with four shots, maybe one scoring chance. Really, our transition game got slow, we started coming back in our own end with the puck instead of going north and that kind of got us away from our game.”
It was evident as soon as the puck dropped on the second period, and the Canadiens needed Price to save them, as he has in so many of the 288 wins he’s notched over his career.
That’s why he’s being paid more than any other goaltender in the world, currently in the first season of an eight-year, $84-million contract.
When Julien was asked about where the breakdown happened on Boedker’s goal, he wasn’t inclined to answer.
“I’m not going to start dissecting the game here 15 minutes after,” the coach said. “I’ll take time to look at it and we’ll go from there.”
It was one of four, but it was the one that gave the Senators the hope they were looking for.
“That Boedker goal was huge,” said Stone. “Once he got that one I felt we started to take over the game.”
It was a sullen Brendan Gallagher who met the media afterwards to express his disappointment that he and his teammates couldn’t capitalize on the 3-1 first-period lead they established to help push Price into a tie with Roy.
“One of the things we’ve been able to do well this year is we haven’t hurt ourselves,” he said. “We’ve been able to play smart, but tonight that wasn’t the case. We got a two-goal lead and for whatever reasons why kind of stopped using our brains at times, made some silly hockey decisions and pucks ended up in the back of our net.
“You want to play well for [Price] and you want to be good teammates. When someone’s chasing a milestone like he is, that’s not something you get a chance to be a part of all that much. I think it’s important to him, and it’s important to us as well, and it’s too bad that we weren’t able to find a way in overtime to get that win.”
And though Price said he didn’t think about that milestone for a second while the game was going on, you know he’d have wanted to make up enough of the difference to be able to reach it on this night.
Perhaps he’ll do that on Tuesday, when the Calgary Flames visit the Bell Centre.
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