MONTREAL — The episode continued with Joe Veleno trapping Mattias Ekholm to start the loop and ended with him burying his second goal of the season and Montreal's second in what turned out to be a 4-1 win over the Edmonton Oilers.
Everything that happened leading up to this game was what this game was made of for the Canadiens.
When Veleno intercepted Connor McDavid's forced pass and fired past Calvin Pickard, it capped a 57-second shift that spanned all 200 feet of ice. He, Jake Evans and Josh Anderson lost the faceoff after dumping the puck, and by defending like the game was on the line, they pushed the play up the ice and forced the world's best player and his linemates to defend until they broke down.
The entire sequence required attention to detail, intensity and the kind of persistence that the Canadiens simply lacked for the better part of six weeks.
However, they had it this shift after it was reinstated at the start of Sunday's game and held it until the final whistle.
“This was our best game of the season,” Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis said.
It wasn't a coincidence that the Canadiens came up with this right after playing perhaps their sloppiest game of the season, a 5-4 loss to the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden 24 hours earlier in which they gave up leads of 3-0 and 4-2.
“Marty was obviously very angry,” Veleno said.
We wondered if he and the rest of the players were the same and felt that they needed a long, hard look in the mirror if they weren't. Because Saturday's game wasn't a wash; this game was an important lesson for a young and tenacious team that was looking for – and could not find – consistency.
“It's about the whole team playing more desperately, playing like it's the playoffs,” Jake Evans said, and he was right.
But it wouldn't matter if he was the only one aware of it.
Because that wasn't the case, what we saw on Sunday was something completely different from what we saw in a game that was mostly up-and-down, up-down, but mostly up-up, which put the Canadiens' character, system and coach on trial in the court of public opinion and unraveled much of the good that had seemed cemented by a 9-3-0 start.
Hey, it's never going to be straight away for the youngest team in the league. And there are probably even more bumps and turns on the road ahead.
But the Canadiens, who worked together to stabilize the bus on Sunday, have given them a road map on how to better handle the bumps and turns when they come.
“I don’t think anything in life is linear,” St. Louis said. “If this non-linearity teaches us anything, I think it's when you have 20 guys who care about the team, I think there are (less) failures and you rise faster.”
It's a commitment that needs to be made over and over again, and making it far from the finish line is anything but easy. As St. Louis always says, deadlines drive urgency, and the deadline is still 50 games away.
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But Games 31 and 32 were wake-up calls just when the Canadiens needed to wake up. The shame of Saturday's game and the threat of shame on Sunday was loud and clear for all to see.
“I think sometimes you have to play against the best players to realize that this is how you have to play, because then you play more with the knowledge that they can do something very bad to you,” Veleno said.
To play “that way” meant to play simply and smartly, to play directly and coherently, to play intensely and relentlessly, and to manage every situation as needed.
The Canadiens did it from the start.
They then took two penalties in the same sequence and fought tooth and nail to kill a five-on-three they would not have survived if not for five saves made by Jakub Dobes.
The Canadiens rode the momentum Dobs gave them until Ivan Demidov broke the ice on their power play 2:28 into the second period. And then they methodically and systematically broke down the Oilers to create three lead chances and a lot more momentum for Veleno to take advantage of.
“We frustrated them simply because they were good defensively, on the right side of the puck, winning battles and forcing them to give up pucks,” he said. “Teams get irritated when you take away their time and space, and we irritated them.”
It was Evans, Anderson, Matheson and Carrier who irritated McDavid all night, limiting him to just a pathetic secondary assist on the power play in the 13th.th minute of the third period, long after Nick Suzuki made it 3-0 Canadiens.
The playoff intensity Evans demanded was present from start to finish.
“I definitely saw it tonight,” he said. “I thought it was one of our most complete games. Just simple games. You score a couple of goals against a really experienced team that will make you pay quickly, and everyone contributed. Literally. Everyone literally scored goals.”
This is the template a team must use to consistently win in this league, with its unforgiving schedule and tough standings.
Relying on skill – even if you have enough of it – rarely works, and games like the games against New York and Edmonton should reinforce that lesson for the Canadiens.
“Tonight was very encouraging and I feel like if we do this, it will help you be consistent,” St. Louis said. “And when you have consistency, you're going to hit home runs, you're going to keep moving up in the standings. If you don't have consistency, you're just rolling the dice.”
On Sunday, the Canadiens seemed to finally acknowledge that reality, and it allowed them to grow a little.
We'll find out the exact amount on Tuesday when they face the Philadelphia Flyers.
