The Montreal Canadiens and Philadelphia Flyers both have 48 hours to recover from ugly losses before they square off Thursday evening in Philadelphia.
The Canadiens (33-28-9, 75 points) had generally been playing well before Tuesday’s 6-1 setback in St. Louis against the Blues. They came into that contest sporting a six-game points streak (3-0-3) and with an 8-1-4 record over their previous 13 games.
However, that Montreal team did not show up in the opener of a four-game road trip. The Canadiens allowed two goals in each period and were outshot 37-25 for the game.
“I’d say it’s all on us probably,” said Nick Suzuki, who scored the only goal for Montreal. “Probably our worst game in a while. I don’t know, we just have to be a lot better than that with how important these games are.”
The Canadiens entered Wednesday’s action in the second wild-card position in the Eastern Conference, one point ahead of the New York Islanders and New York Rangers. Montreal won’t face either of those teams on this road trip, but will face challenging matchups in Carolina and Florida before heading back north of the border.
“To me at this time of the year, I feel like … I heard this saying the other day: it’s not failure tonight, to me, it’s fertilizer,” Montreal coach Martin St. Louis said. “That’s the way it needs to be.”
Philadelphia (28-36-9, 65 points) needs all the fuel it can get at this point. The team has dropped six games in a row and finds itself 10 points behind Montreal with only nine games left.
Their Flyers’ playoff aspirations — already a long shot — might have been pronounced dead following the team’s winless five-game road trip over the last two weeks. The exclamation point on the 0-4-1 trek came Tuesday with a 7-2 pounding at the hands of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“This falls on me,” Flyers coach John Tortorella said. “I’m not really interested in learning how to coach in this type of season, where we’re at right now. But I have to do a better job. So this falls on me, getting the team prepared to play the proper way until we get to the end.”
Ryan Poehling and Sean Couturier scored for Philadelphia but that did not matter much as the team allowed seven goals for the second straight game. Samuel Ersson yielded all seven goals Tuesday after Ivan Fedotov gave up seven in Sunday’s 7-4 loss in Chicago.
“It’s ugly right now,” Couturier said. “… We’re not capitalizing when we have chances to be in the game or take the lead and the other way, we’re letting in a lot of goals, so we’re making it hard on ourselves. But no one really feels sorry for us. It’s on us to dig deeper, put our working boots on and come back next game.”
The Flyers and Canadiens have not met since Oct. 27, when the Habs slipped past the Flyers 4-3 in Philadelphia. The final matchup between the teams takes place April 5 in Montreal.
