Young Canadiens continue to show resilience despite sloppy loss to Blue Jackets

The Montreal Canadiens lost to the Columbus Blue Jackets for the eighth time in their last nine visits to Nationwide Arena, but this one looked a bit different from recent ones there.

Not this part, though: The Canadiens played hot potato instead of hockey for the first 20 minutes, made careless errors to surrender momentum every time they gained it through the next 40, and ended up giving up six goals.

To do that to a team missing three of its four best offensive players is impossible to excuse, and the Canadiens know that.

But this game wasn’t a complete failure—like most of the other recent losses in Columbus—because no matter what happened, the Canadiens kept fighting.

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In this season where development trumps all for the Canadiens, resilience being a consistent feature of their game represents growth.

It doesn’t undo the bad from this loss in Columbus, or the bad in any loss so far, but its repeated presence is a positive the team can continue to build on.

Before the Canadiens left Montreal, and before they lost to a New Jersey Devils team that has now won 11 games in a row and is crushing all comers, we asked coach Martin St. Louis what he felt was the biggest reason they had gotten out to an 8-6-1 start and won three games in a row.

He pointed to the fight his team showed in a win over the Red Wings in Detroit on Nov. 8.

“Sometimes things happen in a game, and you rally around that and you come out of it on a good side, and momentum,” he said. “That’s real emotion, that’s real energy. I look back at the Detroit game, where we felt that we weren’t on the right side of many calls and we had to defend I think 12 minutes in penalties, and we come out on top in that game. Savy (David Savard) takes a 10-minute misconduct, we have five Ds in the third for 10 minutes, and we just rally around the circumstance that we were in and were able to pull away.”

When we asked Canadiens alternate captain Brendan Gallagher the same question, he brought up the way his team battled in another game as the biggest sign of growth he’s seen from last season to this one.

“I think we’ve been put in some situations in games where we haven’t panicked, which has been great,” Gallagher said. “Even (in a 5-4 overtime win at the Bell Centre last Saturday) against the Penguins, we were really outplaying them and kept finding ourselves down. But it’s nice to see us show a lot of maturity and not panic and find a way to keep fighting and sticking to our game and pull out a win.”

Gallagher was dead right about what he told reporters in Columbus after Thursday’s loss, saying his team played what might have been its worst period of the season to start the game.

But if you’re a Canadiens fan, you have to like that when Gallagher was asked if he was pleased his team kept pushing in spite of that, he responded, “We’re a team in here…No one’s going to quit, no one’s going to give up.”

It’s a sign of progress that this mentality has become the standard for a team that laid down on so many occasions last season. It’s progress that’s the internal expectation for a team so few on the outside expected anything from before this season started.

From down 2-0, the Canadiens showed many signs of resilience against the Blue Jackets on Thursday—both as a group and individually.

Jordan Harris was on the wrong side of the pucks that got by Samuel Montembeault in the first period, but he got the Canadiens on the board with his first of the season in the second. Josh Anderson was hounding his former team in the first period and broke through with three seconds remaining in the middle frame to tie the game.

The Canadiens were dominating the third period when former Blue Jacket Savard fell at the offensive blue line and bobbled up a 3-on-2 rush Boone Jenner finished to put Columbus up 3-2. But that didn’t deflate them.

The Canadiens kept pushing and tied the game off Gallagher’s stick less than three minutes later.

Sean Kuraly made a great individual play to give the Blue Jackets a 4-3 lead before Nick Suzuki was beat as clean as he’s ever been beaten on a defensive-zone draw to help Mathieu Olivier make it 5-3.

Suzuki didn’t sulk. He pulled back the next draw at centre ice, darted his way through coverage, collected a bank pass and then knocked in his 11th goal and 21st point of the season on a brilliant play that caught Joonas Korpisalo off his angle.

If not for a bad bounce with 2:13 to play, which Kuraly took advantage to score an empty-net goal to make it 6-4, this one could’ve easily been tied up and won by Montreal.

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The Canadiens tilted the ice over the back half of the game and finished with 58 per cent of the expected goals at 5-on-5. They appeared as though they wouldn’t be denied despite all the self-inflicted damage.

They’ll learn from the slop they served up in the first period and the goals they gave away in the third, but they’ll also take something away from feeling like they still could’ve won.

This is a young team that’s going to make mistakes, and that’s to be expected.

But young teams don’t generally give themselves as good a chance to win as the Canadiens did on a night where they’re making too many mistakes.

And you could look at their competition—an injury-riddled Blue Jackets team—and dismiss the relevance of that, but that would ignore that this wasn’t some one-off effort from the Canadiens.

Their willingness to battle has been their trademark through 17 games.

Win or lose, they’re fighting, and that’s fundamental to the identity they’re trying to build and the culture they’re trying to establish.

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