Dave Feschuk: Against these Bolts, plucky Canadiens might just be screwed

If you boiled down the Montreal Canadiens’ ride to the Stanley Cup final to its simplest essence, in a lot of ways it came down to star-player suppression: They beat better teams because they stopped their best.

They held Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner to one goal between them in the seven-game ouster of the Maple Leafs that launched their unlikely journey. They sized up the top four regular-season goal scorers for the Winnipeg Jets — Kyle Connor, Mark Scheifele, Nikolaj Ehlers and Blake Wheeler — and limited them to one combined goal in a four-game sweep. And at the moment when the hockey world assumed the Canadiens would be exposed as fraudulent champions of an allegedly inferior North Division — in the league semifinals against the Vegas Golden Knights — the plucky underdogs from Montreal essentially repeated the formula. They formulated a game plan to target top names. And when you glimpsed the final statistical report, Vegas’s top-four regular-season goal scorers had been held to one goal among them.

So it had to be jarring for the Canadiens to assess the smouldering wreckage of Monday’s 5-1 blowout loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 1 of the championship series. Contrary to the script of Montreal’s previous three series victories, the lamentable evening ended with too many of the Lightning’s top players atop the scoresheet. Nikita Kucherov racked up two goals and an assist. Kucherov’s relentless centreman, Brayden Point, compiled three assists. Team captain Steven Stamkos chipped in with a goal.

And Lightning head coach Jon Cooper certainly deserved at least a smidgen of the credit for marring Montreal’s once-impeccable shutdown record with such whopping numbers. Cooper used the benefit of the home-ice last change to feed Point and Kucherov a steady diet of the Montreal line featuring 21-year-old Nick Suzuki and 20-year-old Cole Caufield, this while Phil Danault, Montreal’s go-to defence-first centreman, spent all of 2:09 at five-on-five against Point and Kucherov.

“We were pretty far from our best game,” Danault told reporters Tuesday.

Maybe that’s true. But it’s not as though the Point-Kucherov connection was some kind of fluke. Over the most recent two post-seasons, nobody in the league has come close to matching the duo’s level of production, never mind stopping it. Kucherov, in particular, has 64 points in 44 playoff games when you combine this year’s run to the final with last year’s lifting of the Stanley Cup. Here’s the list of players who’ve scored more points over consecutive NHL playoff seasons: Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. That’s it. That’s the club. Point, for his part, has a league-best 28 goals in the two most recent post-seasons — as many as the Maple Leafs have scored as a team over that span. It helps that Point has played in 42 games, of course, while Toronto has played in 12.

“It is always fun to watch guys come up and rise to the occasion,” Victor Hedman, Tampa Bay’s ace blueliner, was saying on Tuesday. “And (Kucherov) seems to do that every game.”

In other words, even if Danault gets more run against Tampa’s best line, let’s just say there’s a stellar recent track record that suggests Point and Kucherov, unlike the top names on the Maple Leafs and Jets and Golden Knights, will very likely find a way to get theirs.

Whether or not the best players on the Maple Leafs can learn from watching, clearly they’re of the belief they’re merely another chance away. Tuesday’s announcement that the Maple Leafs were re-signing veteran forward Wayne Simmonds – bestowing him a two-year deal with an annual average value of $900,000 U.S. in the wake of the re-signing of veteran forward Jason Spezza to a one-year deal worth $750,000 — suggests Toronto’s latest failure wasn’t epic enough to sour management on a decent portion of the status quo. Or maybe it simply speaks to a lack of ready options in an impending capped-out summer.

“It was our (absence of) killer instinct,” Simmonds told reporters, assessing Toronto’s playoff flop. “We’ve got a lot of young guys on our team and sometimes it takes a little bit of sting for you to realize that you’ve got to work a little bit harder every summer. You’ve got to push your teammates that much harder to get to where you want to be.”

Kucherov, of course, might point out that he racked up 22 points in 26 playoff games as a 21-year-old making a run to a Stanley Cup final in 2015. And Montreal might mention the fact that they’ve got younger players who’ve gone plenty far without the benefit of such “sting.” To their credit, as the Canadiens faced the Zoom camera Tuesday, they didn’t seem like a team in panic mode. They pointed out how they lost Game 1 in the league semifinals to the Golden Knights and somehow managed to right themselves in short order. They pointed out how a good portion of Tampa Bay’s opening-game production came off Montreal giveaways. And while such carelessness simply can’t happen, there was optimism it can easily be corrected.

“They’re going to create their own offence,” Montreal assistant coach Luke Richardson said, speaking of the Lightning. “We don’t have to help them in any way.”

Said Suzuki of Kucherov: “We really have to do a good job against him, especially if they’re trying to line match against my line … We knew we weren’t going to win four games in a row. The result could have been 1-0 or 5-1. It’s still a loss.”

Maybe. But let’s not undersell the significance of what Point, and in particular Kucherov, have been doing here. Though they’re the obvious centrepiece of the league’s most formidable team, and though opposing coaching staffs clearly make every attempt to limit their time and space, they’ve somehow found a way to outwit the best-laid opposing Xs and Os and keep the numbers coming. Best of luck to the Canadiens in finding a way to stop the deluge.

“It’s one thing to do it once but if you can do it over multiple playoffs it says something special about you and your talents and to be able to perform at the biggest moments,” Cooper said of Kucherov. “I think that’s what separates the good from the great, is the guys that can do it in the big moments. And he is certainly one of them.”