Written by Eric Engles at SportsNet.com
Max Pacioretty stood with his hands at his hips, wearing a defiant look on his face as he stared down reporters and said his team had to be disappointed about a blown opportunity.
There’s no doubt about it.
His Montreal Canadiens let two precious one-goal leads — and a myriad of opportunities to ice a pivotal game in their series against the New York Rangers — slip away. As a result, they lost 3-2 in overtime and are now staring elimination from the Stanley Cup Playoffs in the face.
“Nothing really we can do about this now,” said Pacioretty. “There were opportunities to close out the game…
“We have an opportunity now to show what we have in this room. We’ve come back a lot this year, and hopefully we can do it in this series as well.”
History — according to Elias Sports Bureau — says the Canadiens have a 21.9 per cent chance of doing it.
In order to pull through in Game 6, they’re going to have to forget about how they held a 2-1 series lead after dominant games that followed a series-opening loss, and they’ll definitely have to erase the missed opportunities in Game 5 from their memories.
There was much promise in the air for the home side at the Bell Centre on Thursday.
In a first period played at breakneck speed, the Canadiens scored two goals, had 15 shots on net, threw 25 hits and won 65 per cent of the faceoffs.
When Artturi Lehkonen drove in on the forecheck in the eighth minute of the frame, the fans moved to the edge of their seats. When he trapped Marc Staal, stole the puck from him, and cycled the play out to Nathan Beaulieu, they rose. And when Lehkonen corralled Beaulieu’s point shot, beat Staal to the outside, and jammed the wraparound through Henrik Lundqvist’s pads to open the scoring, they nearly broke through the sound barrier.
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