Bruins vs. Habs 11/5/19 PREVIEW

Just the Facts:

• The Time: 7:30 EST
• The Place: Centre Bell, Montreal, QC, Canada
• Place to Watch: NBCSN
• Place to Listen: 98.5 The Sports Hub
• Opposing SBNation Blog: Eyes on the Prize. They get enough clicks so we’re being petty and not linking it.

Know your Enemy:

• Brendan Gallagher and Jonathan Drouin are your leading pointgetters for the Habs, both tied with 12.
• Ryan Poehling will be taking the ice after a stint in the AHL. He’ll be slotted between noted Bruins killer Paul Byron and Artturi Lehkonen
• The Habs are surprisingly close to Boston in terms of team-wide fancystats: they have a .02% edge in CF%, and a .32% trail in FF%.
• If only by default, Carey Price is once again the lifeblood of the Canadiens success or failure, with a .915 SV% and 6 wins in 11 starts.

Game Preview:

Not 24 hours after a game that was doing all drugs forever all at once and especially during the 2nd period, the B’s gotta go north of the border to face off against their archrival on their home turf.

The time for RnR was last week, as we’re all aware.

On paper, this should be a game Boston has a strong edge in: while the Habs are quite comparable to Boston in some ways regarding offense, getting good even scoring across the lineup, the reality is that some of the names in their depth they wanted to get going like Artturi Lehkonen and Jesperi Kotkaniemi aren’t finding the back of the net as much as they’d hoped. Adding to that, the Habs currently boast the league’s 4th-from-the-bottom penalty kill (which admittedly is a pretty unusual thing for a Claude Julien team), and a team with serious defensive deficiencies on their back-end, and a disappointing start for Keith Kinkaid and Carey Price, though with the contract the latter has, it’s probably difficult to say even a merely “okay” start would’ve justified it. If the B’s just play some team defense and let the offense do what it’s supposed to, they should walk out the victors.

On paper, anyway.

But in practice, because this is a 21st century Bruins-Habs game, we know that both sides are going to smooth out their brains upon seeing each other, and proceed to play the very dirt worst version of this contest possible. Boneheaded mistakes will be common, the ice will somehow be terrible, and tensions will run high. Just as they have since they started playing this team back in the late 20’s. It’s what makes this rivalry so great and simultaneously so frustrating: there’s nobody that gets under either team’s skin quite like each other. Oh sure, they haven’t been to the playoffs recently and that’s sort of dulled the knives we carry for this diseased brand, but the simple fact that most games involving them involve

So naturally it’s going to be appointment viewing, and I for one cannot wait to see how this rivalry begins all over again!