For two periods last night, the Montreal Canadiens were right there with the Pittsburgh Penguins. They were certainly not perfect periods of hockey, but they were close enough that the Habs entered the third period with a one-goal deficit, and a chance to win the game. Few, if any, would have predicted the final score of 9-2, as the Habs turned in one of the more disastrous third periods in recent memory, setting ablaze any chance they had of keeping it close, let alone winning.
How this team wins and loses is more important this year than the wins and losses themselves, and the fact that this team simply quit on the game is a significant problem.
I was just praising Anderson's play the other day, but this is a completely stupid penalty to take.
— Matt Drake (@drakemt.bsky.social) December 12, 2024 at 10:12 PM
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I’m not entirely sure if it was the 4-2 goal before this penalty, or the 5-2 marker that came during the two-minute minor, but somewhere in the early goings of the third period, the team collectively quit. I don’t blame Josh Anderson alone for his dumb penalty, and I don’t blame Mike Matheson for having the most strangely terrible game of his life – the entire team made a business decision that they were going to float their way to a 9-2 drubbing, despite entering that period trailing by just a goal. They completely quit on a game they were still in, in front of their paying customers at the Bell Centre.
It’s understandable when they lose because they run up against a superior roster. When they put up a fight, but the simple reality is that they’re a rebuilding team that can’t regularly compete with the elite, virtually everyone can stomach that. But even if the Penguins are the superior team at this juncture, this clearly wasn’t that. This was them completely abandoning the game, and it isn’t the first time they’ve done it. They have a tendency to quit on games when they go down two or more, and this isn’t something that Martin St-Louis can tolerate.
He has to bench someone, and perhaps multiple people. I’m not talking about sending his bottom-pairing defenceman to the press box, he has to send a message to the purported leaders on this team that they can’t be doing this. They say a two-goal lead is the worst lead in hockey, but a two-goal deficit for the Habs might as well be six with the way they quit.
You can chalk these games up as one more loss towards the possibility of drafting James Hagens, or Porter Martone. Lord knows this team could use some more impact players to become competitive again, so losing doesn’t sting all that much from that perspective. But if they can’t at least learn the fortitude to keep playing in games when they fall down a couple of goals, no amount of impact players will cure that.
Good teams can erase deficits. Decent, and even bad teams will at least fight, and try to erase deficits. I don’t know what that makes the Habs, because right now, they just give up altogether.
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