Canadiens Lineup

Cole Caufield – Nick Suzuki – Kirby Dach

Jonathan Drouin – Sean Monahan – Evgenii Dadonov

Mike Hoffman – Christian Dvorak – Brendan Gallagher

Juraj Slafkovsky – Jake Evans – Joel Armia 

Kaiden Guhle – David Savard

Joel Edmundson – Arber Xhekaj

Jordan Harris – Johnathan Kovacevic

Jake Allen – Sam Montembeault

Michael Pezzetta, Chris Wideman, Josh Anderson (suspension)

Carey Price (knee), Paul Byron (hip), Emil Heineman (finger), Mike Matheson (abdominal strain)

Game Report

The bottom line is that the Canadiens won a rematch in Detroit via the shootout and collected two points before heading home to meet the Canucks on Wednesday night. The much-maligned Mike Hoffman scored twice to lead the offence with the Canadiens captain coming through in the shootout, scoring the game-deciding goal.

A quick, superficial look at the game summary will tell you that Jake Allen was named first star with a 41-save performance. But let’s investigate a little deeper.

The Red Wings are a young inexperienced team much like the Habs. At 5-on-5, they fired 43 shot attempts in the direction of the Canadiens goal. But surprisingly, Detroit managed just five high-danger scoring chances in 65 minutes tonight.

So, while Allen was busy, he spent the evening fending off a lot of low-quality opposition shots. It was a similar case at the opposite end of the ice with Ville Husso facing just four high-danger scoring chances in three periods plus overtime.

Credit to the Canadiens defence for keeping Detroit shots to the outside, especially given the lack of discipline by David Savard who found himself spending 12 minutes in the penalty box. Fortunately Montreal penalty-killers were perfect on the night with seven kills.

While it’s easy to tip the hat to Allen, who certainly deserves praise for his volume of saves, albeit relatively routine ones, the critical moment in the game was Hoffman’s second goal with 16 seconds left in the first period that forced the Red Wings to chase the Canadiens for the next 30 minutes.

It is expected that the NHL Department of Player Safety will review Juraj Slafkovsky’s dangerous hit on Matt Luff. Slafkovsky was penalized five minutes for boarding and a game misconduct.

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