Canadiens' quest to bottle Lightning a chance to prove contender status

TAMPA, Fla. — Four days ago, I was asked by Martin Lemay on his excellent French-language podcast Le Retour to identify areas in which the Montreal Canadiens are definitively better than the Tampa Bay Lightning, and I responded, “None.”

Because the thing about this matchup is that one team has created a brand so consistent that the greatest player in the world, Connor McDavid, recently singled it out as the gold standard everyone (including his Edmonton Oilers, who are hoping to reach a third consecutive Cup Final) is chasing, and the other team is the Canadiens.

They’re young, brash, full of energy and talent, and, as a result, they produced just as impressive a regular season as the Lightning did. Both teams finished with 106 points, and both emerged near the top of the NHL’s most competitive division. They split four games in their season series, matching each other goal for goal and punch for punch, and the inference that they would be just as closely matched in a best-of-seven in the playoffs is anything but out of place if you’re basing it purely on all of that.

But as Cole Caufield wisely said before he and the Canadiens departed for Tampa, “We haven’t really done anything.”

The Lightning, on the other hand, have done it all. 

We’re talking about a team that played for three of the last five Cups and won two of them. They’re backstopped by arguably the best goaltender of his generation in Andrei Vasilevskiy, propelled by a generational superstar in Nikita Kucherov, coached by a sure-fire future Hall of Famer in Jon Cooper, and dripping in winning culture. 

It’ll be up to the Canadiens to prove they can beat all that in games that matter much more than the ones they’ve played against them to date.

Martin St. Louis knows.

“I’ll give you facts: They’re a veteran team that’s been pretty much the standard the last seven-plus years, eight years, 10 years,” he said on Thursday. “They’re good. We’re good, too. Those are facts. 

“Whether we’re favourites, underdogs? That’s why we play the games, so we’re not worried about this. We’re going to go play the games.”

If at the end of them, the Canadiens are still standing, then we can start proclaiming they’re better in certain areas.

At least they were good enough to earn this opportunity. Especially offensively, where they were driven by Caufield becoming the organization’s first 50-goal scorer in 36 years, Nick Suzuki becoming its first 100-point player since Mats Naslund in 1986, Juraj Slafkovsky emerging as its best power forward since John LeClair played hero in several games of the 1993 Cup run, Lane Hutson tying Larry Robinson for a franchise record for most assists by a defenceman in a single season (66), and Ivan Demidov pacing all NHL rookies with 62 points. 

The Canadiens also got here by riding their depth to fully clamp down defensively in the second half of the season, giving first-year goaltenders Jakub Dobes and Jacob Fowler the means to form one of the league’s most formidable duos down the stretch.

Now it’s time to see if all that translates to immediate playoff success.

Prior to late-season losses to the Canadiens, Cooper talked about how he had no doubt it would come for them in the future. 

He said the Lightning built up their brand over years. He explained how it became so consistent and reliable, no matter who came in and out of their lineup and talked about how the seeds of something similar were being sown in Montreal.

“Consistent ownership, GM, coach, staff, I think that’s a big part of it,” Cooper said on March 31. “Our leadership core’s been primarily the same, and then you bring guys back (like Yanni Gourde) who have played here already, so that helps. I think we’ve had the standard here for some time and we’ve had success with it and we don’t break it, and I think the players have come in well aware of what we do here and what has to be done and the standards that are held here, and guys that have been here hold them to it when I’m not around. So I think that’s been a big thing for us. 

“And I’m pretty sure you’re going to see it across the hall there. Marty’s been there for some time now… and he’s growing up with these players. These players are growing up with him. Knowing Marty and having been with him and coached him and knowing his personality, he’ll have a standard that is not going to be broken… and I think you’ll see the same thing in Montreal in the coming years.”

Two weeks out from a playoff series that seemed destined to materialize between the Canadiens and his team, Cooper wasn’t about to suggest that timeline is rapidly advancing.

And when he was asked again by reporters in Tampa on Friday about similarities between the rising Lightning of the mid-2010s and the current Canadiens, he was hesitant to lean too far into the comparison, saying, “It’s hard for me to sit here and predict what’s going to happen in Montreal.”

“But do they have a great core? Yes,” Cooper acknowledged. “Do they have a great coach? Yes. In management, ownership top to the bottom, they’ve got everything that’s set up to succeed, and a whole bunch of young, talented players that are just coming up and finding themselves. 

“So, is the path there? It is. They just have to do it.”

Why not now?

That’s the question the Canadiens have been asking themselves in the lead-up to Sunday’s Game 1, which gets underway at 5:45 p.m. ET on Sportsnet.

“We made it to the party. That’s kind of the first thing is getting there,” said Caufield. “We know the type of guys that they have over there, that have a lot of experience and know what they’re doing, but we have belief in our guys that play the right way and do the right things, and I think those are the things that give us a chance.

“It’s a seven-game series, and it’s usually the best team wins. You’re able to break teams down with energy, pace, physicality. I think those (Lightning) teams, they were good for a long time, and we’ve been chasing those guys for a while.”

The Canadiens have a chance to catch and pass them, and doing so would say much more about what kind of team they are than anything else they’ve done to this point.

They aren’t definitively better than the Lightning in any category just yet, but their quest to change that over the next two weeks starts right now.