Anyone who knows me knows that the Montreal Canadiens are not my favourite hockey team. Not even close. But I'll give them this: they have an irritating habit of refusing to leave when they're supposed to.
Now, before someone starts digging through more than a century of playoff results to prove me wrong, I'm not suggesting the Canadiens always exceed expectations. They obviously don't. But I can't help thinking about two of their most recent playoff appearances. In 2021, they came back from a 3-1 series deficit against Toronto and kept going all the way to the Stanley Cup Final. Five years later, they survived a seven-game opening-round battle against Tampa Bay, won another Game 7 in the second round and found themselves in the Eastern Conference Final. In both cases, Canadiens fans got to experience something every hockey fan wants: watching their team play an extra game, win an extra series and go further than most people reasonably expected them to go. When it was finally over, they could walk away with their heads held high. I only wish I knew what that felt like.
Maybe there is something to the words that have looked down upon generations of Canadiens players from their dressing room: "To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high." The words come from Canadian physician and poet John McCrae's In Flanders Fields. In Montreal, they sit above images of players who aren't simply among the greatest Canadiens ever; some are among the greatest players ever to play hockey. Richard. Béliveau. Harvey. Plante. Lafleur. Roy. Twenty-four Stanley Cups. Generations of history staring back at whoever pulls that sweater over his head. It is difficult to imagine a more imposing reminder of what wearing that sweater is supposed to mean.
Nine Shots
On May 3, Montreal walked into Tampa for Game 7 of its opening-round series against the Lightning. Sixty minutes later, the Canadiens had won 2-1. They had taken nine shots on goal. Nine. Tampa had 29. Montreal went the entire second period without registering a shot and went 26 minutes and 55 seconds between shots on goal. Somehow, after that second period, the score was 1-1.
This wasn't simply one of those statistical oddities in which a team registers very few official shots but spends the night buzzing around the opposing net. Montreal was hanging on. Jakub Dobeš gave them the opportunity to do it, stopping 28 of Tampa's 29 shots. Nick Suzuki had given Montreal the lead late in the first period before Tampa tied the game on the power play in the second. Then, at 11:07 of the third, Lane Hutson's point shot was stopped by Andrei Vasilevskiy, the puck came off the end boards and Alex Newhook batted it from behind the goal line and in off Vasilevskiy. Montreal 2. Tampa Bay 1. Nine shots were enough.
“Round Up!”
Afterward, Martin St. Louis walked into a jubilant Canadiens dressing room. What followed may be the simplest explanation of this entire story. St. Louis told his players, "You're not gonna win many games shooting 10 pucks on net, but you're gonna win this one!" Someone in the room corrected him: "We had nine." St. Louis didn't miss a beat: "Round up!"
It's a great hockey moment, but buried inside the joke is something important. St. Louis wasn't arguing against the statistics. He was agreeing with them. You're not going to win many NHL games taking nine shots. But Montreal won this one. That's the distinction that sometimes gets lost when we talk about analytics.
Probability Isn't a Promise
Statistics can be extraordinarily good at telling us what is likely to happen. That doesn't mean they can tell us with certainty what will happen tonight. Expected goals don't appear on the scoreboard. A 70 percent probability isn't a guarantee. A team that wins the shot battle isn't automatically awarded the game, and an underdog doesn't have to prove that the favourite isn't better. It only has to beat the favourite once. That's why they play the games.
Imagine Montreal and Tampa could replay that Game 7 over and over under identical circumstances. Give one team 29 shots and the other nine enough times and we would expect the underlying advantage to reveal itself. Play it once and anything can happen. Play it ten times and we'd expect the stronger underlying performance to become increasingly apparent. Play it hundreds of times and the outcomes should increasingly gravitate toward the probabilities suggested by the underlying performance. But hockey doesn't give us hundreds of identical Game 7s. It gives us one. Montreal won it. That doesn't make the statistics wrong. St. Louis essentially told us they were right: you're not going to win many games that way. Probability simply leaves room for the improbable, and Montreal found that room.
Seven Games Tell Us More
There is another reason not to reduce the Tampa series to one wonderfully bizarre game. All seven games were decided by one goal, four required overtime and the road team won five times. A single game can be dramatically affected by a goaltender, a deflection, a post, a strange bounce or one mistake. Seven games give us more information, but even seven games aren't a laboratory. Four games in this series went to overtime. Change one bounce in one of them and perhaps we're telling an entirely different story.
St. Louis acknowledged something similar after Game 7. Tampa deserved a better result in the deciding game, he said, while Montreal probably deserved better in Game 6, when Vasilevskiy helped force the finale. Over time, some of those things have a way of balancing out. Sometimes they don't. That's sports.
Remember 2021?
Leafs fans certainly do. Montreal fell behind Toronto three games to one in the opening round. It looked over. Then the Canadiens won Game 5 in overtime, won Game 6 in overtime and walked into Toronto for Game 7 and won 3-1 behind Carey Price. Surely that was the story. It wasn't. Montreal swept Winnipeg, then beat Vegas in six, and suddenly a team that had been one loss away from elimination in the opening round was playing for the Stanley Cup. Tampa Bay eventually ended the run in five games.
But consider what Canadiens fans had just experienced: down 3-1, three consecutive elimination games against Toronto, then swept Winnipeg, took out the heavily favoured Vegas Golden Knights and then the Stanley Cup Final. Nobody needed to pretend Montreal had won the Cup to appreciate what had happened. Their team had kept giving them another game, then another, then another series. Five years later, Canadiens fans got that feeling again. Montreal survived Tampa, survived another Game 7 against Buffalo and reached the Eastern Conference Final. Once again, the Canadiens had found a way to hang around longer than many people expected.
And Then There Are the Humans
There is another part of this that numbers have a much harder time accounting for: people. Analytics can measure shots, shot location, possession, expected goals, scoring chances, zone entries and dozens of other things that help us understand what happens on the ice. But how do you measure belief? How do you quantify a dressing room rallying around its coach, a team finding something to play for beyond itself, or the confidence that comes from surviving an elimination game nobody expected you to win and then doing it again?
We hear players talk about confidence and momentum constantly. Sometimes we're tempted to dismiss those things because they're difficult to measure. I'm not sure we should. There are times when a team seems to catch wind in its sails. The bench gets louder. A goaltender makes one more save. Players throw themselves in front of shots. Somebody who normally hesitates suddenly doesn't. The favourite starts gripping its sticks a little tighter while the underdog starts playing as though it has nothing to lose. Can analytics capture all of that? Maybe pieces of it. I'm not convinced they can capture all of it.
Sometimes the human element can take everything the numbers tell us should happen and throw it out the window, at least for one night. And sometimes one night becomes two, then three, then a series. That doesn't mean talent or statistics don't matter, and it certainly doesn't mean believing hard enough turns nine shots into a sustainable strategy. Hockey players aren't coins being flipped. They react to what just happened. Confidence can change behaviour. Pressure can change behaviour. Leadership can change behaviour. A spectacular save can change the emotional temperature of a bench. Winning a game you weren't supposed to win can change what a group believes is possible in the next one. Maybe belief doesn't change the probabilities, but belief can change the people trying to beat them. Once a team starts believing? Voilà. Vive les Canadiens! Sometimes all you've gotta do is believe.
Carry the Torch
That human element was hard to miss in Montreal during the 2026 playoffs. Before each Canadiens home playoff game, a different former Hab carried the team's iconic torch into the Bell Centre as part of the pregame ceremony. Yvan Cournoyer opened the home schedule against Tampa, followed during the run by names including Serge Savard, Guy Carbonneau, Larry Robinson and others. The physical torch has roots going back to the move from the Montreal Forum in 1996, but the 2026 playoff presentation gave the symbolism a particularly vivid form.
Now imagine being a current Canadien standing there before one of those games. The lights are down, more than 20,000 people are waiting, and one of the men who helped build the history represented above your dressing-room stall enters carrying the torch. Not a figurative torch. The torch. For the people in the seats it is magnificent theatre. For the players, it must be something different. The words above the dressing room - "To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high" - are suddenly being acted out in front of them. One generation is quite literally carrying the torch toward the next.
Can I put a number on what that does to a player? No. Can an expected-goals model measure it? No. Does that mean it has no effect? I don't believe that either. That's the part of sport that may always resist being reduced completely to numbers. Players rally around coaches and teammates. They rally around cities, history, adversity and causes that mean something to them. Sometimes a team catches wind in its sails and starts believing the next game belongs to them. Then the ceremony ends, the lights come back on and there is only one thing left to do: lace up the skates and live the line written above the greats.
I Don't Have to Like Them
I don't have to like the Montreal Canadiens. And I don't. But I can't help but hold them in the highest regard when they find a way to give everything they have when there is nothing left to save it for; when they refuse to go quietly, empty the tank over 60 minutes or seven games, and make the other team actually take the series from them. There is something admirable about that regardless of the sweater they wear.
And when a team does that, who knows whether the analytics are going to tell the story that night? Maybe the numbers say they shouldn't win. Maybe nine shots aren't enough. Maybe every probability favours the team at the other end of the ice. But somebody still has to go out there and prove it. That one night in May, I was entertained by the Habs to say the least.
That's Why They Play the Games
The numbers matter. We should use them, understand them and, over a large enough sample, we would be foolish to ignore what they're telling us. But hockey isn't played over an infinite sample. A playoff game happens once. A Game 7 happens once. And it is played by people - people who can rally around a coach, find another gear when facing elimination, and look around a dressing room at the faces of Richard, Béliveau, Harvey, Plante, Lafleur, Roy and the other giants who came before them and understand that the torch is now theirs to carry.
The numbers can tell us what should happen most often. They can't guarantee what will happen tonight. That's why they drop the puck. Sometimes all you've gotta do is believe. And sometimes, apparently, all you've gotta do is get nine shots. Or ten. Round up.
Olé, olé, olé, olé, oooolé, ooooolé!!!
Hold Fast. Think Sharp. See the Game Clearly.
