After four days of inactivity, Tuesday night couldn’t come any sooner for the Montreal Canadiens and their fans. Tonight, they face the Philadelphia Flyers in what will conclude the eight-game road trip that began shortly before the Holiday season. It was a tough road trip, marred with losses (5 in 7) and inconsistent lineups. Frustration mounted to the point of forcing captain Max Pacioretty to drop an F-bomb while giving an interview, while many experts were calling for a veteran’s banishing to the press box and Michel Therrien’s head. Overall, it has not been pretty for a Habs team that once sat atop the NHL’s standings and more comfortably so in the Atlantic Division.
January 1st marked the much-anticipated return to action of RW Brendan Gallagher, who scored and added an assist against the Boston Bruins while providing his trademark energy and non-stop work ethic. A player like him has earned and rightfully deserves all of the respect that his teammates have for him. His style of play will not change anytime soon, and that’s just fine for everyone in the organization.
Tonight’s game is against a .500 hockey team that has been struggling for years to find their identity. They’re the second-lowest scoring team in the league, with a power play clicking at 16.4% (good for 27th overall) and their penalty kill is hardly any better (26th in the league). This is a team that the Habs absolutely need to beat. If they dominated the Bruins the way they did, they must prove that they’re capable of putting out their best efforts against teams that are out of playoff contention. In fact, they need to show that their early-season successes were not a fluke, and that they are indeed a force to be reckoned with. Simply put, they need to go out there and skate circles around a mediocre team that has lost 4 of their last 5 games, including the last three on the road.
Ben Scrivens gets the nod in net tonight, as Mike Condon will surely play in tomorrow night’s matchup against the New Jersey Devils. Unsurprisingly, Carey Price has not started to skate yet and tomorrow marks the 6-week “minimum… recovery the team had publicly declared. Evidently, he should not be rushed back into action anytime soon. Precautionary measures need to be applied when it comes to franchise players like himself, despite how much he’s itching to get back on the ice and be the X-factor we’re all accustomed to him being.
On the injury front, Dale Weise will be sidelined for approximately 2-3 weeks and Devante Smith-Pelly will look to remind his head coach that he deserves to have a permanent spot on the team. Though he’s struggled of late after getting back from an injury, he will surely look to seize this opportunity while Sven Andrighetto takes a backseat in tonight’s game.
No changes are expected to be made besides that. Tonight’s lineups:
Pacioretty-Plekanec-Gallagher
Eller-Galchenyuk-Carr
Fleischmann-Desharnais-DSP
Byron-Mitchell-Flynn
Beaulieu-Subban
Markov-Petry
Emelin-Barberio
Cheers!