TAMPA, Fla. — A season full of winning can still be defined by a loss. You never seem to forget the losses.
Carey Price played the role of Houdini this year, helping the Montreal Canadiens wiggle free from the straight jacket and escape the water tank, and yet still found himself apologizing for essentially failing to land a backflip on the way out.
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It was downright jarring to hear him attempt to take responsibility for Montreal’s inability to get past the Tampa Bay Lightning in the second round of the playoffs.
“I didn’t play well enough for us to win the series,” Price said Tuesday night. “I think that’s basically more or less what it comes down to. We lost a lot of tight games. I just needed to make that one more save in all the games that we lost and I didn’t do that.”
Even if the cold hard facts appear to back his assertion up, they certainly don’t tell the whole story. Montreal outshot the Lightning 192-155 in this series — coming out on top in all but the clincher — and Price surrendered six more goals than counterpart Ben Bishop.
But it would be foolish to parse the 2014-15 season into the 13 days and six games that will ultimately define in.
Without Price, the Canadiens weren’t a 110-point team. Without Price, they wouldn’t have enjoyed home-ice advantage. Without Price, they would have lost Game 6 in Ottawa and might not have escaped the first round.
“As a team we’ve got to understand that Carey’s the best goalie in the world but he’s also human,” said defenceman P.K. Subban. “Things are going to happen out of his control sometimes and we’ve got to respond for him. Listen, Carey will always say the right things, I’m sure he’s frustrated, but we need to be better around him.
“I don’t care what Carey says, we need to be better around him and support him more.”
It was easily the most self-aware take to emerge from the disappointment of the losing locker-room. The inescapable truth is that Price is extremely unlikely to ever top his personal brilliance in the 2014-15 season — one that should see him take home the Vezina Trophy and Hart Trophy.
He was sublime.
But he needed a little more from his friends. Look at how Tampa advanced to the Eastern Conference final: It saw the Ondrej Palat-Tyler Johnson-Nikita Kucherov pick up the offence when Steven Stamkos went through a drought, and eventually had Stamkos come up big against the Canadiens.
His goal against Price in the second period on Tuesday night was a back-breaker. The ridiculous Stamkos wrist shot through Jeff Petry’s legs made it 2-0 and you just knew that would be too big of a hill to climb.
For Montreal, there should be no shame in being the 25th team eliminated this season. But it must recognize how far it remains from adding a 25th banner to the rafters at Bell Centre.
“I think too many times this year (Price) bailed us out and that’s got to change moving forward if we want to be a successful team in the regular season and the post-season,” said Subban. “If we expect him to play the way he’s played this year every year, it’s unfair.”
There are some parallels here with the Lighting team that came within one game — one goal — of reaching the Stanley Cup final in 2011. That was an unexpected run, one GM Steve Yzerman suspected was unsustainable, and he set about remaking the roster.
Only Stamkos and defenceman Victor Hedman remain as part of the team that returns to the third round now.
“Look at the guys we’ve brought in the last couple of years, look at the guys we’ve been able to develop, sometimes it’s hard to go through that transition,” said Stamkos. “As a player you want to win every year. But when you got guys who know what they’re doing running the team, it pays off.”
Montreal shouldn’t need an overhaul that dramatic, but this group still feels a tad further from its ultimate goal than the one that lost to the New York Rangers in Round 3 a year ago.
There were plenty of successes this season but a lot of dissatisfaction when it mattered most. Price embodied that.
The Habs weren’t dominated by the Lightning and arguably weren’t as lucky, but they also weren’t as deep either.
“We did a lot of good things to be in the series, but to to win the series you’ve got to finish,” said Subban. “You’ve got to be great, and we weren’t great.”
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And so the Stanley Cup will stay south of the 49th Parallel once again. Not since the Habs clinched a championship at the old Montreal Forum in 1993 have hockey fans partied in the streets of a Canadian city in spring.
Of course, there are still plenty of Canucks remaining in the tournament, and those men won’t make any apologies for their role in keeping that run going.
“Stanley needs a tan,” said Stamkos, dusting off a line from Tampa’s 2004 Cup run.
After the parade of champions we’ve seen the last few years, the tan probably hasn’t worn off in a decade or more.
