Daily Picks: Habs over NYR in heavyweight tilt
Welcome to the NHL Daily Picks where hockey writers Adam Gretz and Chris Peters make their selections for all of the day’s games.
Montreal Canadiens vs. New York Rangers, 7 p.m. ET
Before the NHL takes the day off on Thanksgiving it has a huge schedule on Wednesday night that features 26 teams in action.
The highlight of that schedule is in New York where two of the league’s top teams this season faceoff with the Rangers, the top team in the Metropolitan Division, hosting the Montreal Canadiens.
The teams are not only tied for the top spot in the East with 34 points each, they will also be putting the two best goalies in the NHL on the ice when Carey Price and Henrik Lundqvist take their spots in the crease.
The great thing about this matchup is these teams are pretty similar in how important their goaltender is to their success. Goaltending is an important factor for every team in the league, but these two teams sometimes take it to the extreme in how much they rely on their starter. Last season Price pretty much single handedly lifted the Canadiens to one of the top spots in the Eastern Conference playoffs and put together one of the best single season goaltending performances in league history. It was a year that won him pretty much every major award that he was eligible to win as a goalie (MVP, Ted Lindsay Award, Vezina Trophy, and Jennings Trophy while also leading the NHL in save percentage and goals against average).
So far this season, Lundqvist looks to be duplicating Price’s 2014-15 performance as he lifts a talented Rangers team that hasn’t really started to play its best hockey yet.
The Canadiens, meanwhile, seem to have realized that if they were ever going to reach the next level and go from being a good playoff team to a legitimate Stanley Cup contender they were going to need to make some changes so they didn’t have to rely on their goalie to win every game 2-1. The early results this season have been promising. Last year’s team never would have been able to sustain a lengthy injury to Price like they did earlier this month and keep winning games the way they did, and they’ve already earned as many points in the standings this season (16, thanks to a 7-2-2 record) without Price in the starting lineup than they did all of last season (6-6-4 without Price).
Part of that has been the play of Mike Condon as Price’s backup, but a bigger factor has been the Canadiens’ newfound ability to score goals. After failing to score more than two goals in half of their games last season, they’ve scored at least three goals in 18 of their first 22 games. They’ve also scored five goals five different times. They did it just eight times all of last season.
You give a team with Carey Price and P.K. Subban on the backend that much goal support and it’s going to win a lot of games. And they are going to keep winning on Wednesday. Pick: Canadiens 3, Rangers 2
The rest of Wednesday’s picks
Nashville Predators 4, Buffalo Sabres 1
Columbus Blue Jackets 3, New Jersey Devils 1
Pittsburgh Penguins 3, St. Louis Blues 2
Washington Capitals 5, Winnipeg Jets 3
Carolina Hurricanes 3, Edmonton Oilers 1
Minnesota Wild 4, Vancouver Canucks 3
New York Islanders 3, Philadelphia Flyers 2
Detroit Red Wings 5, Boston Bruins 3
Los Angeles Kings 4, Tampa Bay Lightning 2
Arizona Coyotes 2, Anaheim Ducks 1
Ottawa Senators 5, Colorado Avalanche 2
San Jose Sharks 4, Chicago Blackhawks 3
The Canadiens take on the New York Rangers on Wednesday night. (USATSI)
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