Canadiens find way to endure, advance with Game 7 win against Lightning

TAMPA -- Martin St. Louis entered the jubilant Montreal Canadiens dressing room and thrusted his arm in the air, igniting whoops from his euphoric players.

The Canadiens had just defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning 2-1 in Game 7 of an epic, best-of-7 Eastern Conference First Round series on Sunday, and the Montreal coach decided it was time to imitate actor Leonardo DiCaprio in the classic movie, "The Wolf of Wall Street."

“We’re not leaving! Let’s keep going!” St. Louis yelled before repeatedly beating his fist on his chest, replicating a scene from the 2013 hit flick.

“It was awesome,” Canadiens forward Alex Newhook said. “It was the perfect message."

It was Newhook who allowed them to survive, scoring the winner at 11:07 of the third period to give these young Canadiens the opportunity to punch their ticket into the Eastern Conference Second Round and a date with the Buffalo Sabres beginning with Game 1 at KeyBank Center on Wednesday (7 p.m. EST; TNT, truTV, HBO MAX, SN, CBC, TVAS).

Newhook’s goal capped a bizarre game in which the Canadiens went 26:55 without recording a shot on goal, a span that included the entire second period. It was the first time in Montreal’s illustrious postseason history that they went shotless in a period.

Ironically, the most important one they had in the game, one of only nine throughout the entire 60 minutes, came from behind the goal line courtesy of Newhook, who batted a one-hop rebound from the backboards off the back of Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy and into the net.

Asked if he’d ever played baseball to make contact like that, the Canadiens forward laughed.

“Nope,” he said. “Pretty good hand-eye coordination there, though.”

He paused to look around the dressing room. This place, where the visitors reside at Benchmark International Arena, was the site of his career highlight. As a member of the Colorado Avalanche, he sipped from the Stanley Cup after winning the championship over the Lightning here in 2022.

This wasn’t quite the same high. But it was close.

“It felt good,” Newhook said. “I mean, it definitely crossed my mind a few times when we were heading back here for Game 7, just knowing that I’d been there, done that, in this building.

“I was just hoping that it would stay the course and remain the same here, and it feels great.”

No one felt that more than St. Louis.

The 50-year-old played nearly 13 seasons with the Lightning from 2000-14, including helping them win the Stanley Cup in 2004. During his time with the team, he won the Hart Trophy as the NHL's most valuable player (2003-04), the Ted Lindsay Award as the “most outstanding player in the NHL,” as voted on by members of the NHLPA (2003-04), and the Art Ross Trophy as the scoring champion twice (2003-04, 2012-13).

How fitting then, that the 2004 Stanley Cup championship banner, as well as his No. 26, which was retired by the Lightning on Jan. 13, 2017, was above his head as he exchanged respect with Lightning players and Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper in the handshake line after the final horn had sounded.

He then proceeded to the dressing room and went full DiCaprio in rejoicing with his players. 

Just call him the Wolf of Crescent Street, the downtown Montreal thoroughfare that's known for its lively nightlife.

“I feel like you can’t take the player out of me a little bit,” St. Louis said. “I don’t try to be in the locker room a lot. To me, this is their space. It’s their team, it’s not my team. I’m trying to steer them.

“But every now and then, I have moments with them, and I try to pick my spots. Tonight, on a night like this, I wanted to be with them. We had some fun.”

That wasn’t the case when the Canadiens came into the dressing room at the end of the second period.

The Canadiens had not registered a shot since captain Nick Suzuki had opened the scoring way back at 18:39 of the first period with his first goal of the series. In that span, they’d been outshot 12-0 in the second, including a Dominic James goal at 13:27 on the power play that tied the game 1-1.

Enter St. Louis, whose speech during the intermission brought life to his moribund team.

“We had just played our worst period of the series,” he said. “But we didn’t do too much damage because they had only scored one power-play goal. We were still putting in the work defensively, but we were unable to turn the tide.

“When you come back from a period like that, it’s physically and mentally draining. It takes a bit of the wind out of your sails. We put things back into perspective -- the situation we were in. It was a 1-1 in a winner-take-all game. We had to forget about that period and get our rhythm back.

“I liked our third.”

It was only the third time in NHL history that every game in a seven-game series was decided by one goal. Four of those went to overtime. Only once was there a two-goal lead by either team, that being a 2-0 lead by the Canadiens in Game 4 in a contest the Lightning would win 3-2.

In the end, the Canadiens, outshot 29-9, found a way to endure.

“Sometimes, in games like this … the hockey gods kind of turned in our favor,” summed up Canadiens center Phillip Danault.

“We have to admit it. Things went our way.”

And now, the Canadiens are on their way to Buffalo.