Cowan: Tripped up by mistakes, it’s time for Canadiens to make lineup changes

When Canadiens GM Kent Hughes was a guest recently on The Sick Podcast with Tony Marinaro, he spoke about how head coach Martin St. Louis is an eternal optimist.

“Marty is the most positive guy in the world,” Hughes said when Marinaro asked him about the team’s progress this season. “We can play the worst game and he’s going to find something good about it, and I’m probably the guy that could watch us play the best game and look at something that we could do better.”

With that in mind, it’s not a surprise St. Louis tried to put a positive spin on things after the Canadiens blew a 2-1 third-period lead and lost 3-2 to the Lightning in overtime Tuesday night in Tampa. The best-of-seven first-round playoff series is tied 1-1, with Game 3 on Friday (7 p.m., CBC, SN, TVA Sports) and Game 4 on Sunday (7 p.m., CBC, SN, TVA Sports) both at the Bell Centre.

Lightning centre Anthony Cirelli trips Canadiens winger Alexandre Texier during the first period of Game 2 on Tuesday in Tampa, Fla. Chris O'meara / AP

“Listen, it would have been nice to get two (wins),” St. Louis told reporters in Tampa. “If you would have told us before we came, ‘You’re going to split,’ we would have taken it. I felt like after two periods, we were so close of getting two (wins), especially the way we were playing. It just kind of got away from us a little bit.”

It got away because of big mistakes by Juraj Slafkovsky and Kirby Dach that simply can’t happen in a tight playoff game.

Slafkovsky — the hero of a 4-3 overtime win in Game 1, scoring three power-play goals, including the winner — threw a blind pass up the middle in the defensive zone with the Canadiens leading 2-1 and less than eight minutes left in the third period of Game 2. The Lightning’s Brandon Hagel intercepted the pass, and seconds later, Nikita Kucherov scored the tying goal.

With less than eight minutes left in the first OT period, Dach had the puck in the neutral zone and rather than taking a couple of strides to get over the red line, he made a lazy flip of the puck before heading to the bench and it resulted in an icing. Alex Newhook — who would never be taking a defensive-zone faceoff if it wasn’t following an icing with no line change allowed — lost the ensuing draw to Anthony Cirelli and Dach failed to get out to the point to cover his man. J.J. Moser was able to skate basically untouched into the right faceoff circle and score the winning goal.

“He was at the end of his shift,” St. Louis said when asked about Dach icing the puck. “You definitely want to avoid those types of icing calls.”

Hughes wouldn’t have liked what he saw with Slafkovsky throwing the puck up the middle, and the GM’s head might have exploded when he saw Dach icing the puck in OT.

Slafkovsky also made a mistake when he decided to drop the gloves and fight Hagel during the second period. Slafkovsky has developed into a dominant power forward, but he’s not a good fighter. He got dropped by a right to the chin from Hagel, who is an inch shorter and 40 pounds lighter than the Habs winger.

The Canadiens need Slafkovsky on the ice, not in the penalty box for five minutes, and he’s fortunate the punch from Hagel didn’t do more damage and he was able to get back up.

St. Louis is right that any team starting a playoff series on the road is looking to steal one game — and the Canadiens did that. But they had a chance to put a stranglehold on the series by going up 2-0 and blew it with two costly mistakes and totally losing their game in OT, when they were outshot 9-0.

Teams taking a 2-0 lead in an NHL best-of-seven playoff have gone on to win the series 86 per cent of the time with an overall record of 360-58. Teams that fall behind 2-1 in a series go on to win the series only 31 per cent of the time with a 178-396 record.

So Game 3 will be huge for both teams, and the Canadiens have given the momentum to the Lightning.

With the importance of Game 3, St. Louis should make some lineup changes. If it were up to me, I’d take Dach and Alexandre Texier out and replace them with Joe Veleno and Brendan Gallagher.

I’d also put Oliver Kapanen back at centre between Newhook and Ivan Demidov and have Veleno between Zachary Bolduc and Gallagher. Veleno is a big body at 6-foot-1 and 201 pounds and uses his size much more effectively than the 6-foot-4, 221-pound Dach. Gallagher is only 5-foot-9 and 185 pounds, but plays like he’s 6-foot-4 and 221 pounds. The veteran, who bleeds bleu-blanc-rouge, will be chomping at the bit to get back in the lineup after being a healthy scratch in the playoffs for the first time in his 14-year NHL career.

“There’s fine lines out there, and we just weren’t able to put them away,” captain Nick Suzuki told reporters in Tampa. “Just excited to get back to Montreal and get ready for Game 3.”

Unfortunately for the Canadiens, Game 2 might have been a turning point in the series.

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