The Montreal Canadiens awoke Sunday morning in snowy, blustery Edmonton as a second-place team for the first time all season. They’d been tied by Ottawa (but technically passed), their six-game winning streak had been snapped Thursday in Calgary in a 5-0 whooping, and now a flu bug was running through the team.
Montreal had one more game to play before closing a four-game road trip that had started in New York City and ended on the Western Canadian prairies, and 53 minutes into the game against the Edmonton Oilers, Montreal trailed 1-0.
They were about to go 0-for-Alberta, when something happened.
“It was a different feeling than we had last game,” said Brendan Gallagher, the Habs spark plug who won the corner battle that would become Montreal’s ice-breaker 13:33 into the third period. “I think we didn’t deserve to score against Calgary. Tonight we did a good job of continuing to press, continuing to press and we had that belief, regardless of how many saves the other guy is going to make, eventually we’re going to break through.
“Surely enough it happened before the end of the game for us. We stuck with it and got rewarded.”
This was a game that would form a chapter in the Coaching 101 text book, as Montreal didn’t deviate from its game plan despite a 1-0 deficit in the game’s waning moments. They counted on their goalie, Carey Price, to deny the Oilers a second goal, won their battles, and collectively raised their arms when Gallagher won a puck to Phillip Danault, who fed Byron in the slot for the 1-1 goal.
Then, as if the Hockey Gods had switched their Centre Ice package over to the game just moments before, the Habs got the gift of perseverance just 69 seconds later when a shot deflected off of Oiler Oscar Klefbom’s stick and slipped under the crossbar behind a chance-less Cam Talbot.
A couple of empty-netters by Byron — who had been flu stricken only the day before — and Max Pacioretty, and Montreal boarded their charter with a tidy 4-1 win.
“He’s a great player,” Pacioretty said of Byron. “He’s huge for us offensively and he’s not just scoring meaningless goals either. Those are huge goals. He broke through tonight and got the game-winner against Nashville (four games ago). He’s got some good poise with the puck and it shows and was rewarded.”
With 14 games to play, the two Alberta teams will take it down the wire with a possible Battle of Alberta at stake in the playoffs, along with the realistic chance one of them misses altogether. More likely Edmonton, a team that’s gone 3-5-1 in its past nine game while the Flames have strung together a nine-game winning streak that ties the record since the Flames arrived in Calgary in 1980.
This was the Canadiens night, however, in a building that had more red jerseys in the stands than orange ones among the 18,347 patrons.
“Gallagher played one of his best games,” said head coach Claude Julien. “Paulie Byron does the same thing. (Artturi) Lehkonen we saw around the net, with (Andrew) Shaw. (Torrey) Mitchell played a solid game for us.
“We didn’t deviate from our game even if it was 1-0. We kept doing what we thought we had to do … and eventually it paid off. Even after tying the game we didn’t sit back. We kept goin’ after them.”
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Price took a 1-6-1 career mark versus Edmonton into the game, and earned the first win of his career in Edmonton.
The Canadiens are back in first place in the Atlantic, for now, while Edmonton assumes the chase position on Calgary, a team they’d been ahead of all season long.
“As a group,” said Oilers winger Jordan Eberle, “we have to look at where we are in the standings, what we have left, and start getting on a roll.”
That would be a great idea. Dallas is in Tuesday.
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