It was the kind of game players love to play in and coaches hate to watch.
Two middling teams — both of them sitting on the playoff bubble in their respective conferences — trading mistakes, bad penalties and goals galore.
In the end the Montreal Canadiens beat the Vancouver Canucks 7-5, but the fans who got to watch it were the real winners of this one.
Let’s delve into some takeaways from the game.
Jeff Petry impersonates Shea Weber
The Canadiens knew they’d be in tough without their leading defenceman, who has been sent home to Montreal with a nagging foot injury he could no longer play on.
Karl Alzner was asked before the game about how his team could replace Shea Weber, and the defenceman responded that the Canadiens didn’t have a single player who plays Weber’s style so it would fall on all of them to just step up and do what they all do best individually.
Petry wasn’t exactly erasing guys in front of his own net and in the corners the way Weber habitually does, but he might as well have been wearing Weber’s No. 6 instead of his own No. 26 for this one. He led the Canadiens in ice-time (25:20), had a goal with a booming shot on the power play, added an assist, had three shots on net, a couple of hits and a couple of blocked shots.
Not a bad night’s work.
Carey Price was the best player on the ice … again
In a game that featured a hat trick for Canucks forward Thomas Vanek, two goals for Canadiens forward Nicolas Deslauriers, a beautiful goal from Canadiens forward Alex Galchenyuk, incredible play by Canucks forward Brock Boeser and one of the best saves you’ll ever see from Canucks goalie Anders Nilsson, it was Montreal’s Price who stole the show.
It seems insane to say when you look at the scoresheet and see that he was beat on five separate occasions, but without Price this game ends 10- or 11-6 for Vancouver.
He had 34 saves and was at his best in his home province. Some of his shots were heroic ones with the Canadiens jumping out to a 5-3 lead early in the third period and getting outshot 10-3 in the first eight minutes of the frame.
The goals that beat Price were all scored by Canucks players left all alone in front of him. He couldn’t do anything more to stop them.
Boeser a beast
The kid went from the CT scanner to the ice and put up an electric performance in this game.
Boeser was supposed to be out for a while after leaving a 6-1 loss to the Calgary Flames on Sunday. He blocked a shot with his foot and appeared to do serious damage. Boeser couldn’t put any weight on it as he left the ice and went through multiple tests to see if he had suffered a fracture.
The injury turned out to be a deep bone bruise and Boeser went back into the Canucks lineup.
He was on the ice for more than 20 minutes, scored a huge goal to narrow the Canadiens lead to 5-4 late in the third, had an assist on Vanek’s hat trick goal to make it 6-5 Canadiens with 1:01 remaining, hit a post and had a team-high 11 shot attempts in the game.
His goal on Price was a rocket from the slot that no one in the world would have stopped. It was his 18th of what’s looking like Calder Trophy-winning season.
Habs fourth line does it again
They’ve been on fire since Canadiens coach Claude Julien put them together—and they struck again in this game, combining for three goals.
Daniel Carr had a puck bounce off him on the power play to tie the game 1-1 in the first period, and he made a great play to set Deslauriers up to make it 3-2 Canadiens in the second.
That’s nine points in eight games for Carr. Name another fourth liner in the NHL producing at that clip.
His centre, Byron Froese, made one of the the nicest plays of the game on Deslauriers’ first goal, pivoting around a Canucks defender to slide a perfect pass for his streaking winger to finish.
A first line with promise, a second line that needs work
It was far from perfect, but the newly constructed line of Jonathan Drouin, Paul Byron and Max Pacioretty clicked in this one.
Pacioretty had better scoring chances in his 19:10 of play than he had in any of his last 15 games—over which he had only managed one goal. He didn’t score in this one, but he finished with two assists. Nilsson made what might be considered the save of the year on him, and he opted to pass to Phillip Danault for Montreal’s seventh goal of the game instead of shooting into an empty net.
Byron scored Montreal’s fifth goal on a nifty feed from Drouin.
Things didn’t go quite as well for the new combination of Danault, Galchenyuk and Andrew Shaw. They struggled to find each other for the majority of the evening and ended up being short-shifted by Julien in the third period.
But sure enough, they took advantage of the one good chance they got, when Danault stole a puck in his own zone and set up Galchenyuk for what turned out to be the winning goal.
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