FINAL | Qualifier Series, Game 4 | Friday August 7, 2020

Canadiens win best of five series 3-1

Canadiens Lineup

Tomas Tatar – Nick Suzuki – Brendan Gallagher

Jonathan Drouin – Jesperi Kotkaniemi – Joel Armia

Paul Byron – Phillip Danault – Artturi Lehkonen

Dale Weise – Max Domi – Alex Belzile

Ben Chiarot – Shea Weber

Brett Kulak – Jeff Petry

Xavier Ouellet – Victor Mete

Carey Price – Charlie Lindgren

Ryan Poehling, Charles Hudon, Christian Folin, Noah Juulsen, Victor Olofsson, Cayden Primeau, Michael McNiven, Jordan Weal

Alexander Romanov

Jake Evans

Game Report

This all seems a bit surreal. The Montreal Canadiens have earned a berth into the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs. And they did so by eliminating the Pittsburgh Penguins, a team that finished 15 points ahead of the Habs in the regular season.

The Canadiens only gained entrance to the play-in round given the NHL’s need to make up revenue lost during the pause of the season due to the pandemic. Sculpting the return-to-play rules to include big market cities like Montreal, Chicago and New York City annoyed the hockey purists but allowed the league and players to begin the financial healing.

The Canadiens vs Penguins was deemed the most lopsided series of the Qualifying Round. (At this point, it seems non-trivial to specify that Pittsburgh was the team heavily favored to win.) The most popular prediction was Penguins in four games. 

Analysts conceded that the Canadiens goaltender could steal one game to prolong the series a day. But instead Carey Price stole the entire series. Yes, the series.

While some can’t resist the urge to spread the credit around, the Penguins forward lines dominated the Canadiens in each one of the first three games (by the eye test and aided by advanced statistics.) Price was the reason that Montreal had won two of those games coming into today’s match. And then in game four, all Carey did was to post a shutout in a more closely-contested game.

Artturi Lehkonen, one of the Habs best forwards throughout the series scored the game-winner with just 4:11 left. 

The Canadiens wait to face the winner of the Philadelphia Flyers vs Tampa Bay Lightning for round one of the 2020 playoffs at Scotiabank Arena on Tuesday. And this unreal season for the Habs continues into the second week of August.

Plus / Minus

▲▲ Carey Price

▲  Artturi Lehkonen, Paul Byron, Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Shea Weber, Ben Chiarot, Phillip Danault

▼  Alex Belzile, Dale Weise, Brendan Gallagher, Nick Suzuki, Tomas Tatar, Xavier Ouellet, Max Domi