Far from their best, wasn't it?
The Canadiens couldn't solve Tampa's riddle, not with Sherlock Holmes on their side, and certainly not without making a single adjustment to throw the Lightning off their scent.
Dale Weise wore this loss like a noose.
"That's a bad penalty at a bad time," he offered. No excuses to follow. Pure blame absorbed without hesitation.
Three waves of scrums, individual sit downs with reporters who spoke with him off the record, and he sung that refrain like Spring birds chirping that repeat whistle.
Weise decided he'd give a bit of a shove to Ben Bishop with his stick. He went out of his way to do it. You can't debate the validity of the call, but the referee, who had watched the sequence and prepared to blow it down, certainly noticed the flagrant embellishment by Bishop, and it clearly incensed Weise that he was the only one going to the box.
Michel Therrien tightened the noose and practically slung Weise over a tree in his press conference. Before being asked directly to express his disappointment in Weise, he had more to say about the team's lack of discipline than anything related to the other things that add up to five losses to Tampa Bay this season.
During the game, Therrien had the chance to make Weise's penalties a rallying cry for his team. He could've gone to bat for his player, regardless of how foolish those four minutes in penalties were.
Therrien could've played it up. He could've talked it up with his players on the bench and snapped something into them to inspire some anger and desperation. Instead, he silently brooded, and when Jonathan Drouin's breakaway magic made it a one-goal game, he gave his team plenty of cause to just sag.
Therrien's answer was to shorthand the bench and punish Weise, who played a mere 18 seconds in the second period.
Sag is what they did as Vladislav Namestnikov widened the gap.
With the Lightning holding a 31-13 shot advantage through two periods and just a 3-1 lead, the Habs were still well within striking distance.
When Jeff Petry scored his first goal as a Montreal Canadien 23 seconds into the third period, there was plenty of reason to believe.
A defensive lapse for Greg Pateryn eradicated that belief, despite there being more than 13 minutes for the Canadiens to collect their sorrows and convert them into positive energy.
In the end, a powerplay with just about four minutes remaining was all that bore fruit.
Therrien didn't have much incentive to throw his own system under the bus after the game. But he had no hesitation about throwing Weise under there. There was room for the rest of the team too.
"We don't execute. Pretty simple," he said about the difference between beating everyone else in the league but suffering miserably at the hands of Jon Cooper's Lightning.
Simple is sticking to the plan and sagging when it doesn't work.
And sometimes, it's okay to admit you were wrong, or that there are things you could've done differently to potentially change the outcome of something that seems predestined. Some might even refer to that as leadership.
Hockey--and life--is filled with cliches about leading by example. Therrien slapped the "no excuses" logo on the dressing room wall. Pretty impossible credo to live up to. But, perhaps he should be leading the charge on that if he wants his minions to follow.
Not taking any accountability on the team's failures against the Lightning is optically deficient to these eyes, but we'll see how that plays in the room and on the ice.
Montreal Canadiens Blogger • 
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