WASHINGTON - As he came out of the Montreal Canadiens dressing room, assistant coach Kirk Muller was congratulated on the Habs stunning upset of the top-ranked Washington Capitals with a 2-1 win Wednesday night at Verizon Center.
“It’s too cold,” he said, “to stop playing hockey.”
Muller, a member of the last Canadiens - and Canadian - team to win the Stanley Cup in 1993, played a huge and important role in the upset, constructing, tinkering and tweaking the Montreal penalty killing which limited the best power in the NHL this season to just one goal on 33 chances in the seven-game upset in the Eastern Conference quarterfinal.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that goaltender Jaroslav Halak was channeling Ken Dryden and Patrick Roy for the last three games.
“I thought Kirk Muller did a hell of a job adapting and making adjustments as the series went on. The guys listened,” said Canadiens forward Mike Cammalleri. “And, I should say, Jaro was our best penalty killer.”
The failure of the Washington power play summed up the frustration for the Caps, who had finished 33 points ahead of the Canadiens in the regular season. They are now 1-3 in Game 7s over the last two years, 2-7 overall. It was just 51st time in 131 seventh games that the visiting team won.
“I thought we had a good chance to win the Stanley Cup this year. I would have bet my house that they wouldn’t have beaten us three games in a row and that we would have scored three goals on almost 140 shots,” said Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau, who’s going to feel the heat for having his talented club knocked out in the first round for the second time in the last four springs.
“I told them there was no sense in me saying anything right now because we all feel as low as we can possibly feel.”
The Caps high-powered offence evaporated in the series and if Boudreau will feel the heat, so will the likes of defenceman Mike Green, who took a key penalty Wednesday night and lost a puck battle that led to the Habs’ second goal by Dominic Moore, forward Alexander Semin (no goals) and forward Tomas Fleischmann, also without a score and a healthy scratch Wednesday night.
“It’s a tough one,” said Boudreau. “(The players) were beyond remorse in the dressing room. What I am saying that for is because they cared and because they tried. No tried as much as Alex (Ovechkin) and Nicky (Backstrom). Sometimes you just don’t score goals - the other team takes it away.
“I give Montreal credit. They- the last two guys I mentioned - didn’t have success in the last game scoring, but they tried.”
Now the Caps will face another long summer of criticism and introspection, but Boudreau defended his club’s style of play.
“What style of play are you talking about? All offence?” he asked, pointing out the Caps allowed only eight goals and an average of about 20 shots against a game in the last three games of the series. “It was not all offence. (The loss) doesn’t validate anything. We play the way we were built. It’s hard to make the guys go into trap.
"The games would be boring to watch and the team would not be nearly as successful.”
