The Montreal Canadiens were eliminated by the New York Rangers on Saturday night and Don Cherry believes the reason was a lack of scoring from their smaller forwards.
“If you have small guys like (Andrew) Shaw who is feisty, that’s ok,” Cherry said on Coach’s Corner. “But when you have small guys who don’t score, you will not win in the playoffs.”
In the six-game series with New York, the Canadiens only managed to score 11 goals. Of those, three came from defencemen and only Alexander Radulov and Artturi Lehkonen scored more than once.
Captain and leading goal-scorer Max Pacioretty failed to score, as did Alex Galchenyuk and Phillip Danault.
“Your leading goal scorer doesn’t get a goal in the whole playoffs, you aren’t going anywhere,” Cherry said.
The Canadiens bulked up at the trade deadline, adding Dwight King, Steve Ott and Andreas Martinsen to their bottom six. But those players are not considered scorers, and are more likely to give you a big hit than a big goal.
Cherry pointed to the Edmonton Oilers, who advanced to the second round on Saturday, as a team that was small but added some size and skill that has brought a new dimension to their offence.
“(The Oilers) had all of these kids and then (general manager Peter Chiarelli) got them bigger guys,” Cherry said, citing the acquisition of Zack Kassian, who scored two game-winning goals in Round 1, as an example.
One person Cherry refused to blame for the Canadiens’ loss was Carey Price. The Canadiens goalie posted a 1.86 goals and a .933 save-percentage in the series, but some fans on Twitter weren’t impressed with his performance.
“Price is unbelievable,” Cherry said. “Unbelievable.”
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