The situation called for it.
The Montreal Canadiens, staring down a sixth consecutive loss and playing the first portion of a challenging back-to-back series this weekend, put the wood to the New York Rangers on Saturday night, and their best players were largely responsible for the 5-2 outcome.
Carey Price didn’t face a lot of rubber but he came up with massive saves throughout the night. Tomas Tatar assisted on the goal that made it 2-0 in the dying seconds of the first period and scored the insurance marker on the power play with 9:32 to go in the third period. Brendan Gallagher, Jonathan Drouin and Max Domi all notched assists. Paul Byron, playing in his first game in over a month, set up the winning goal. And Artturi Lehkonen, who always shows up as one of Montreal’s best players but appeared cursed in the goal-scoring department with just two goals on his first 54 shots of the season, buried two on his first two shots of the game.
And then there’s what captain Shea Weber did. You know, the guy who returned earlier this week after off-season surgery to both of his legs and a 345-day layover between NHL games.
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“It’s fairly obvious what he does for our group,” said Canadiens coach Claude Julien.
What Weber’s presence on its own does is make everyone on the Montreal side stand a little taller, which was a topic well-covered back on Tuesday night when he had an assist and 13 shot attempts in just over 25 minutes of ice-time in the team’s 2-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes.
The Canadiens registered 49 shots that night and launched 93 attempts at Curtis McElhinney’s net—against the NHL’s best possession team by the numbers. And on Saturday, they threw 42 shots on net and 63 attempts at Rangers goaltender Alexandar Gorgiev, and the two that went in off Weber’s stick brought the building to life and pumped the wind into Montreal’s sails to pull off this decisive win.
The game was a shade under four minutes old when Drouin swung around Gorgiev’s net, flashed up to the top of the faceoff circle and feathered a perfect pass over to Weber. The big man half-slapped a one-timer and celebrated his first goal in 361 days before the Rangers goaltender even had time to react to the shot.
And then, with a delayed penalty coming to the Rangers, with six seconds left in the first frame, Tatar fell to the ice in possession of the puck and gifted Weber a half-breakaway from his back.
A quick flinch and a wrist-shot upstairs made it 2-0 Canadiens.
“I think the second goal was even bigger than the first,” said Drouin. “When there’s six seconds left and he reads the play that it’s kind of a 2-on-1 and he’s able to follow it and make a nice play, that’s huge. To go into the first intermission with a two-goal lead, that was huge for our confidence.”
You could tell from the start of the second, when added two goals in 3:25 to give the Canadiens a 4-0 lead before six minutes of the period had elapsed.
Sure, there was a momentum swing in the middle— with Jimmy Vesey scoring the Rangers’ first road goal since Nov. 15 and Ryan Strome adding one on the power play 6:01 after Vesey scored. But the Canadiens got on their toes to combat an anticipated wave from the Rangers in the third. They held them to just two shots on net through the first 18 minutes and allowed three more innocuous ones to get to Price as the “na-na-na-na, hey-hey, goodbyes” were being sung by the crowd.
“We had a lot of guys play really solid,” Price said. “I thought we kind of got back to what we were doing at the start of the season.”
The Canadiens kept their opposition to less than 30 shots in five of their first 10 games and recorded 35 or more in five of 10 of them. They moved the puck efficiently out of their own end, they forced the issue with their forecheck, and they got out to a 6-2-2 start.
Domi, Tatar and Gallagher led the way, and Drouin, Byron and Jeff Petry played their part. But Price wasn’t anywhere near his peak.
His play really only began to stabilize in the middle of November, and it’s probably no coincidence that he’s suddenly allowed two goals or less in consecutive games for just the third time this season.
It’s probably no coincidence that the Canadiens allowed their lowest shot totals in consecutive games (22 and 22).
No, there’s a direct correlation to Weber’s return in all of that.
He was a battering ram in front and behind the team’s net on this night, throwing four hits—and multiple crosschecks—as the game wore on. He had five shots on goal and was a force in the offensive zone. And he was hyper-aggressive in the neutral zone.
“When you look at what happened tonight, you got your captain that sets the tone. He’s got two big goals,” said Julien. “From there we kind of took it over… At the end of the day, you need those guys (the team’s best players) to come up big and they did.”
There was no question about it.
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