Canadiens aiming to refocus with season on line following Game 4 loss to Capitals

MONTREAL -- Resilience has been a cornerstone for the Montreal Canadiens on their roller-coaster ride through 82 regular-season games and into the Stanley Cup Playoffs. That quality will be needed against the Washington Capitals on Wednesday or the Eastern Conference First Round will end in five games.

The Canadiens’ hopes are hanging by a thread in this compelling, entertaining series, which they now trail 3-1 after Sunday’s 5-2 Game 4 loss in a sold-out, boisterous Bell Centre.

The Capitals will hope to close it out Wednesday at Capital One Arena in front of their home crowd (7 p.m. ET, MNMT, ESPN, SNP, SNO, SNE, TVAS, CBC). Game 6, if necessary, will be back in Montreal on Friday.

Sunday’s game was closer than the final score would suggest. The Capitals’ final two goals were scored into an empty net, the Canadiens having pulled goalie Jakub Dobes for an extra skater in a bid to send the game into overtime.

“We’ve done it all year with our backs against the wall,” said forward Cole Caufield, whose power-play goal, his third goal of the series, put the Canadiens ahead 2-1 late in the second period.

Caufield’s goal was executed almost exactly as are many by Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin, a 30-foot laser one-timed from the left face-off circle past Washington goalie Logan Thompson. That Ovechkin was watching it from the penalty box was not lost on the roaring fans.

“We keep pushing and we believe in the guys we have in the room,” Caufield said. “Now there’s no more losses or the season’s over. We’ve just got to be ready for the next one, try to keep it as simple as possible. We have to stay focused on the next shift and find a way to get the job done.”

Montreal’s special teams shone on this night, Caufield’s goal and one before it by Juraj Slafkovsky coming with the man-advantage. The team’s penalty kill was perfect in five short-handed situations, including one 43-second stretch in the second period when they were down two men.

“I thought we played pretty well,” captain Nick Suzuki said. “It was a tight-checking game. Both teams weren’t really getting much offense, it was very tight defensively. Our power play got a couple, our (penalty kill) did a great job. But 5-on-5, we need more.

“We’ll talk about it tonight, learn from what happened. Tomorrow we’ll just regroup, think, relax, and go to Washington. We just have to worry about winning one road game right now. That’s my main focus.”

Suzuki’s words pretty much echoed those of veteran defenseman Mike Matheson, who played a game-high 28:00.

“Short-term memory is huge,” Matheson said. “I feel we did a good job even coming into tonight. A young group to have had that big emotional win (6-3 in Game 3 on Friday) in front of such a special crowd, I feel we were able to park that and bring lots of focus and energy into tonight’s game.

“You have to able to do that on the other side of the coin. You have to step back, whether we’d won or lost, and say we’d be going to Washington hoping to win one game. That’s all you have to focus on.”

Canadiens fans might optimistically be looking to the precedent set against the Capitals in 2010, the only other time these teams have met in the postseason. Washington led 3-1 that year as they headed into Game 5.

Then the No. 1 seed, as they are now, the Capitals had three chances to eliminate the Canadiens in the first round. Instead, Montreal, then No. 8 as they are now, won three consecutive elimination games to stun the Capitals and advance.

Bell Centre was almost giddy with anticipation after Friday’s 6-3 Canadiens victory. If Game 4 wasn’t the utter chaos of that night, which was a circus dressed up like a hockey game, it surely had its moments for the home crowd, including a few truly dazzling saves by Dobes.

Plenty of star quality had come out hoping the Canadiens would square the series at two.

Elise Beliveau, wife of late captain Jean Beliveau, Maurice Jr., son of the late Maurice “Rocket” Richard, and Michele Richard, daughter of the late Henri "Pocket Rocket" Richard, were in the house.

So too were three Hall of Famers in Yvan Cournoyer, Guy Lapointe and Guy Carbonneau, who won a combined 19 Stanley Cup championships. They were joined by another 10 or so alumni and the son of Dickie Moore, who was six-time Cup champion and two-time winner of the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s leading scorer.

A highlight in the loss was the first power-play unit of Caufield, Suzuki and Slafkovsky, a trio on the first line, with forward Ivan Demidov and defenseman Lane Hutson. Demidov and Hutson both had assists on the two power-play goals.

The five players average just 22 years, 123 days of age, and it seems likely they’ll be selling plenty of merchandise and standing Bell Centre on its ear for years to come.

Coach Martin St. Louis has given his team Monday off, the staff crunching the details of the loss to prepare a game plan for Tuesday’s practice and win-or-go-home Game 5 on Wednesday.

“I felt that neither team had a lot of momentum tonight,” St. Louis said. “Maybe they had it more because we had to kill more penalties, but our third period, we had a lot of momentum.

“Sometimes, having momentum doesn’t guarantee you anything, but it helps you. I felt we had some good shifts early in the third, but we just have to get the momentum back, right from the drop of the puck on Wednesday.

“Hopefully we keep it long enough and get rewarded with some stuff and win a game and take the momentum of the series and bring it back home. That’s what’s in front of us.”