À la prochaine

National Sports Editor Poor Len Canayen analyses the Montréal-Philadelphia series which ended last night with the Canadien suffering a 3-2 loss.

So dat's it, den. Hard to come back from a deficit of 3 games to 1, but the Habs gave it a pretty good shot, and in the end just had bad puck luck. The Flyers first two goals (in 5 minutes of the first period) both went in off the sticks of Montréal defenders. The third one, which proved to be the winner, hit the goalpost and then caromed in off the back of Carey Price's leg.

You can't blame Price for any of those, or indeed for any of the losses in the series. The problem was not so much bad luck as lack of scoring -- pure and simple. You can't not score for over 130 minutes and expect to win. Your goalie can stand on his head and allow 1.25 goals per game (see my previous post), but if you score 0.0 goals per game, as the Habs did twice, you lose.

Getting back to what Kelly Hrudey called "bad luck"... you can't call it bad luck (entirely) for the goalie when the guys in front of him forget the basics of how to play, or at least one of them. I know, I know. It's hard to think fast when you're out there on the ice in one of the world's fastest games, and it's easy for mere spectators like moi to second-guess, but...

Don Cheery told me more than once this basic rule of defence. It you are between your goalie and the opposing team's shooter, and both you and your goalie are square to the shooter -- directly in line between him and the goalmouth -- what you do not do, as the defender, is stick the blade of your stick out to the side. Let the goalie use his stick to stop the shot. If you try to block the shot with your stick (as opposed to your body), what happens, all too often, is that the puck deflects off the blade of your stick and goes in. That's what happened on the Flyers' first two goals last night. Not bad luck.

For fans of les Glorieux, the playoffs are over. But there's a team called the Canucks, from Vancouver, I believe, who finished off the defending champion St. Louis Blues last night, so it's possible that Lord Stanley's silverware might yet return to the Great No-longer-white North for the first time since the Canadien brought it home in 1993, defeating the Los Angeles Kings.

The winning goal in that series was scored by none other than Kirk Muller, who (because of Claude Julien's heart attack) was coaching the Habs last night. We wish Coach Claude a full recovery and hope he'll be back next season. If that's not possible, the team will be in good hands with Captain Kirk.

And, with some promising prospects coming along, and Nick Suzuki emerging as a potential superstar (he scored both goals last night), I predict with great confidence that 2020-21 will be a much better year for La Sainte Flannelle than this one. And, all things considered, this year wasn't all that bad!