News Article: How the Canadiens Made the Playoffs

[CP31]

How?

• Great goaltending.
• Dedicated players who block tons of shot.
• Opportunistic scoring.
• No panicking.
• Great PK.
• Misleading defensive system: many shots comes from the sides and are not overly dangerous considering the goalie.
• Weak conference.
• Surprisingly talented team for little streches in game, often just long enough to win games (see opportunistic scoring)
• When everybody's healthy, suprisingly efficient dept at forward position, more than most teams in the conference.
• Few team (if any) in the conference have as good #1 and #2 d-men as the Habs.
• One of the most underrated player in the NHL (Plekanec)
• 2 35+ goals scorers (MaxPac and Vanek)

Not a bad team. Full of shortcomings, yes, but things are slowly falling into places for it to become a good team with better stats.

since when do we allow most shots from the outside? The defense has been horrendous most of the year.

 

[Kriss E]

This, and this again. I'd add Grass is green, No **** Sherlock and Thank you Doc. Obvious to the discussion.

People's expectations over here...

Price played a major role. Pacioretty, Markov, Subban and co. all played a major role.

Breaking news : I'm hearing Lundqvist is one of the reasons the Rangers are making the playoffs.

Nobody said it was bad to rely on your best players. As you said, every teams does it. So? I'm not sure how this suddenly means we are playing some awesome brand of hockey, and we're not.
I mean jesus, how do you watch the Boston or TB games and tell yourself ''hey, we're playing well''. There's still plenty of concern with this team. The reason why it's annoying is because there shouldn't be.

There's no freaking reason or excuse for a forward being confused about his defensive coverage this far into the season. None. We're not talking about an AHL call up here. I'm talking about veterans.
There's no reason for us to still be skating around recklessly chasing the puck because we can't cycle it properly in our zone.
There's no reason for us to constantly get outshot and outchance.

We have a team good enough to at least come out on an even level, and we certainly have no reason to be completely dominated by the better teams.

I'll take some time but people will get used to parity. Lesser team still have decent prospects nowadays. Buffalo is a terrible mess, yet their last two games they won against New Jersey and lost in OT against Tampa Bay. Defensive systems are also much more efficient then before.

The Canadiens don't have the team to dominate games like Boston or Pittsburgh. They still found a way to win tight games and that's a great sign going forward.

And yet, we did just fine last year. With Vanek in, our roster is even better than last year. Price is even performing better. But somehow, we constantly get outshot and outchance.
We do have the team to dominate games. We have the luxury of having Lars Eller center the 4th freaking line. If that's not depth then I don't know what is.
Even if he's having a poor year, Eller vs 4th liners will spend all his ice time in the offensive zone.

We do have a team that can dominate, and at the very least, we should be eye to eye (and perhaps some time a little under). Bad games happen to every team, so I'm not talking about the exceptions where we'd just have a bad showing. We have been regularly outshot and outchanced since the beginning of the year. That is problematic.

 

[Jigger77]

Breaking news, hockey is played on the ice and not on paper. More at 11.

I think you'll find that the vast majority of teams are carried by their star players. I don't know why you would expect it to be otherwise.

Bingo.

 

[Sorinth]

To be fair the quote is talking about a bunch of poor stats as the reason they don't "deserve" to have clinched yet.

That's a fair point. On paper however there's no doubt this team deserves to not only be in the playoffs but fighting for home-ice.