First goal wins. That was the name of the game Thursday.  

The Canadiens had their victory in Game 1 sewn up long before Brian Gionta fired a slap shot past Tim Thomas for his second goal of the night to make it 2-0, the game’s final score. To the naked eye, it looked like the Bruins just couldn’t get past Carey Price all night. In reality, they probably could have in the first period.

Yet once the 43rd second of the third minute came and Gionta took a pass from Scott Gomez to make it 1-0, the Canadiens began closing all the roads to the Bruins’ desired destination. 

“We let them get a goal in the first five minutes, so that kind of cost us the game,” David Krejci said after the loss.

The Habs got their lead, and they shut it down. By end of the night, it was surprising the white “H” on Price’s jersey hadn’t turned blue from the pounding it took. The B’s could fire their shots right at Price, but it was tough to get anywhere near the Habs’ netminder, as the laid-back-yet-lockdown 1-4 defense reared it’s frustrating head. 

“When they score first, they shut it down even more,” Tomas Kaberle, whose extra zip on a reverse led to the game-winner, said after the game. “… By the second half of the game, they pretty much played 1-4, and they were waiting in the back. I thought we had a really good second period but we just couldn’t get anything going inside tonight.”

That’s playoff hockey. Get the lead, and get it over with. The Bruins out-everythinged Montreal in the final two periods, but the Canadiens sat back and made sure that no matter what the B’s did, it didn’t show up on the scoreboard. 

This isn’t to say the Bruins didn’t have any real opportunities. They had a handful of chances on Price in the first period, with Brad Marchand coming up empty multiple times. As the game wore on, the opportunites became far more infrequent, and the chances of getting their first win (or even goal) of the series dwindled.

“You feel like you kind of let the team down,” Marchand said of wasting the rare opportunities the Bruins had. “You had opportunities like that and you didn’t bury. You can say ‘what if,’ but at the end of the day there is tomorrow and we have to be ready for that, focus on that and then be ready for the next game. We can’t hang our heads here, and can’t hold onto this. We have to let it go and be ready for the next game.”

The Canadiens blocked 20 shots, and the ones that got through to Price were hardly dangerous. They let the B’s take all the shots at Price’s chest they wanted, but if the Bruins were hoping for rebounds, the Habs were there to keep the B’s away from them. 

Price had the best description of the Habs’ play in the second and third periods, likening it to Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy against George Foreman in 1974’s “Rumble in the Jungle.” The B’s could tire themselves out taking shot after shot, but in the end, it wasn’t going anywhere. While the Habs never got more than eight shots on Tim Thomas in a period, the B’s first 31 shots on Price, none of which were particularly gasp-inducing. 

Though the type of stingy defensive play the Canadiens displayed Thursday is something more typical of the Bruins, it should come as no surprise that the Habs placed less emphasis on adding to the score (they had just six shots in each of the final two periods) and focused more on protecting their lead from the get-go. In the regular season series, the first team to score in the first 10 minutes of the game went on to win on all four such occasions. The Habs let Kaberle’s turnover give them an opportunity to continue that streak, and they never looked back. 

The biggest fear with the Canadiens was supposed to be their speed, but on Thursday, they thought like a playoff team. For a team playing without its top two defenseman, they chose frustrating the opposing offense over trying to pester the goaltender. The result means the Bruins will have to win a game at the Bell Centre (something they failed to do during the regular season) if they want to make it out of the first round.  

“Our guys played great defense and we played a pretty perfect road game,” Price said. “If we were to write down on paper how we wanted to start the series that would be it right there.”