Canadiens falter defensively as mistakes prove costly in loss to Bruins

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BOSTON — David Pastrnak posted up right in the middle of the slot, nestling into hockey’s sniper nest right as his Boston Bruins teammate, Pavel Zacha, was opening a clean shot up for him.

You’d think a shooter of Pastrnak’s calibre would not be left unmarked by the Montreal Canadiens in this area of the ice. This guy isn’t just a good one; he’s the third-highest scoring player in the NHL since he stepped into the league 10 years ago, a player who entered Thursday’s game with 349 goals — the seventh most in the 100 years of Bruins hockey — and the Canadiens’ wouldn’t have needed to have circled his name on their board beforehand to have known allowing him an open look from this spot would be a recipe for disaster.

Nothing needed to be said, everyone knew.

But the Canadiens failed in execution, and Pastrnak scored. 

His goal was Boston’s fourth in a 6-4 win at TD Garden — one glaring example of the Canadiens breaking in this game after bending so much they nearly snapped in half 24 hours earlier.

A night after leaning on goaltender Samuel Montembeault for 48 saves in their first win of the season — a 1-0 nail-biter over the Toronto Maple Leafs at the Bell Centre — the Canadiens faltered again defensively.

Reality set in well before the final buzzer sounded Thursday: There are many corrections to make and little time to make them.

Take it from Brendan Gallagher, who first played with the Canadiens two years before Pastrnak first laced up his skates with the Bruins. He knows how this league works.

“It takes time,” Gallagher says, responding to a question about how to tighten the looseness of early-season hockey. “You feel it getting better every week, but you see the scores (in the first 10 games) — there’s six goals across the league every night. That’s just part of it, it’s a really good league. Guys don’t need too much time to score goals, and all summer that’s what guys work on. They don’t work on their defensive zone, so it takes time for it to come back and to click. 

“But the teams that pick it up the quickest are usually the teams that start to have success, and we want to be that group.”

Part of becoming that group is not using the back-to-back situation the Canadiens found themselves in versus a rested Bruins team as an excuse. 

Gallagher refused to, and so did the rest of his teammates we spoke to after the game.

Gallagher, Nick Suzuki and Kaiden Guhle all acknowledged the opposition was fresh and hungry to bounce back from its own ugly debut in Florida earlier in the week — a 6-4 loss to the Panthers on Tuesday — and they expressed their disappointment in not being able to dodge the haymakers they expected to have to dodge to win this fight. 

That was positive.

It was also good the Canadiens knew why they got popped too many times, so they know what to attack to correct it.

Winning the one-on-one battles for the puck is something the Canadiens must polish. 

Arber Xhekaj lost one in the first period, leading to Mark Kastelic’s galvanizing goal, which came just 56 seconds after Cole Caufield potted his second of the season to put the Canadiens up 2-1.

When Xhekaj lost another one-on-one battle against Zacha 15:56 into the second period, it exposed an issue that might take a bit more time to resolve. 

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Alex Barré-Boulet left Pastrnak a split second early in the defensive rotation when he saw Xhekaj lose that battle, and that left Gallagher a split second late to cover the ice left exposed in front of the most lethal Bruin, who only ever needs a split second to put shots off the crossbar and in.

Both Barré-Boulet and Gallagher had the right intentions on the play. Both had very little time to react, both wanted to deny the player in the hardest area of the ice to defend, but neither player was best positioned to do it.

Consider that neither of them had played a shift together since training camp began and that no amount of video work and conversation about defensive-zone coverage over the 18 days leading up to the season would give them the synergy they would need to close that infinitesimal gap in the moment.

As Gallagher said, “It’ll come, but it just takes repetition.”

All of it does. 

The young Canadiens got a lot of repetition last season and learned some valuable lessons they believe will push them forward this season.

They’ve now gotten some refreshers through the first two games — particularly on how to face an aggressive forecheck, like the one the Leafs employed through the second half of Game 1 and the one the Bruins started with in Game 2.

The Canadiens were also reminded on Thursday of what not to do in the second half of a back-to-back.

“We were trying to make too many home run plays the first two periods, getting into some trouble (with) blue-line turnovers,” said Guhle, who played 23:45 against Toronto and had only one of the 17 giveaways his team committed in Boston.

“It’s something we want to clean up,” Guhle added after notching two assists and finishing plus-3 over his 21:23 against the Bruins. “We want to be better, it’s something we’ve got to clean up.”

When the Canadiens watch video ahead of their game against the Ottawa Senators Saturday, they’ll see several instances over their first two games where they sorted out coverage, killed plays, recovered pucks and then failed to clear their zone. They’ll see others where they just left themselves far too exposed to danger.

Montembeault got them out of it Wednesday, Cayden Primeau couldn’t do the same Thursday.

He battled hard for his teammates, but battled himself and the Bruins, too, for most the night.

“As a goalie, you want to give the team confidence, you want to start off on a good foot early so that way they can settle in,” Primeau said.

Despite his best effort, he couldn’t do that through the first half of the game, and he said the goal he wanted back most was Kastelic’s second and Boston’s last — a bank shot off the heel of his goalie stick just 17 seconds after Gallagher had scored Montreal’s fourth of the game.

Primeau will look to rebound quickly, and so will the Canadiens.

“We’re going to correct the mistakes,” coach Martin St. Louis said.

Whether it was the glaring one that led to Pastrnak’s 350^th or the others that came before and after it, they must.

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