Canadiens can't finish on limited chances in OT loss in Game 3 of East Final

MONTREAL -- Nick Suzuki had a breakaway and missed the net. If he scores on his shot 35 seconds into overtime, then the Montreal Canadiens are winners, this city is bedlam, the shot counter becomes irrelevant, and all is right in Quebec.

"There's always the future," Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis said.

Twenty-five seconds into the future, defenseman Mike Matheson had a shot ring off the crossbar. 

"Yeah, it would have been exciting," Matheson said. "It would have been nice to see it go in." 

Fast-forward more than six minutes, and Alex Newhook's shot from the top of the left face-off circle to the far side off the rush hit off Carolina goalie Frederik Andersen's left pad at 7:13. It went from first being a shot on goal, to getting taken off the board and then, finally, back to being one. Montreal's only one in the extra period.

The Canadiens did not bear down on those three chances in overtime, and not surprisingly, they didn't get another one.

For the second straight game, they were close to pulling off a magic trick despite getting badly outshot, but Andrei Svechnikov scored at 14:06 to give the Carolina Hurricanes their second straight 3-2 overtime win and a 2-1 lead in the best-of-7 Eastern Conference Final.

The Canadiens ended up getting outshot 38-13, including 6-1 in overtime. Newhook's shot was Montreal's first in 17:07 and its second in what amounted to the final 37:40 of the game.

"We're two shots away from being up 3-0 in the series," Matheson said.

He's 100 percent right, except the Canadiens didn't get those two shots.

They didn't get any in overtime two nights ago and lost when Carolina forward Nikolaj Ehlers scored at 3:29. They had just the one Newhook shot in overtime of Game 3 and only five in the last 49:23 after Lane Hutson's power-play goal made it a 2-2 game at 4:43 of the second period.

Carolina had 22 on top of the 32 that either missed the net or were blocked.

It's true that the Canadiens do not need many chances to score, that they are skilled and opportunistic, but it's a hard way to play physically and mentally when the chances you get are so few and far between. 

It's hard to recover, especially mentally, when you don't bear down and bury the rare chances you get, like in overtime Monday night.

"It's probably easy to look at it like that, but I feel like that's a tough way to play if you are thinking like that," Matheson said. "I think we've definitely shown that we can generate more. I think we need to definitely have more O-zone time, though. That's the toughest thing, when teams are, shift after shift, hemming you in your zone and making your lives difficult. That's hard to play against."

That's Hurricanes' hockey and that's life for the Canadiens in this series. They turned the tables in Game 1 by executing well through the neutral zone and taking advantage of Carolina being slow, rusty and out of sorts after 11 full days between games.

But the Hurricanes have now, in the past two games, outshot the Canadiens 64-25 and out-attempted them by a near 2:1 margin, 160-84.

Both games went to overtime, not because the Canadiens have been opportunistic and taking advantage of their chances, but because the Hurricanes have not done enough to bury Montreal when they have had the chance.

"That team over there is a good team, very mature," St. Louis said. "I don't know if we can match their maturity, but we're going to have to elevate that."

That doesn't start with bearing down on chances like Suzuki, Matheson and Newhook had in overtime. 

It starts with handling Carolina's aggressive forecheck and relentless pressure, with being quicker to read and react, which goes back to St. Louis' line about the future.

"As much as your space is going to get closed out quicker, you better think about the future quicker," he said. "It's always there. We've just got to do it quicker. I feel at times we're playing too slow, and sometimes, we play at the right pace, but we don't execute."

Talk about a bad combination.

"I thought we had good flashes of being connected, getting pucks out and getting pucks back and putting them in," Hutson said. "We just have to be connected all the time."

It seems like an impossible task against the Hurricanes, and it is. There is no way the Canadiens can be connected all the time against them. No team ever is unless the Hurricanes are as out of whack as they were in the first period of Game 1, when Montreal rolled to a 4-1 lead.

But being connected as much as possible, playing quicker, getting pucks deep, winning them back and getting them toward the net (it doesn't have to be on net all the time) is what the Canadiens must do against the Hurricanes.

"You're at this stage now, you have to put it all together," St. Louis said. "Execution is part of that, jam is part of that -- there's not one thing. We've just got to put it all together. I know we can. We didn't expect this to be easy and we're OK with that."

It can't stay this hard, though. If it does, it'll continue to make the missed opportunities seem gigantic, too big to overcome. 

"There's always the future," St. Louis repeated. "Always."