Matheson’s desperation helps keep Canadiens in control of wild-card race

Mike Matheson was scrambling in front of Jakub Dobes to preserve a one-goal lead with nine seconds remaining in a game the Montreal Canadiens needed. He had already been on the ice for 2:20 at that point — for the whole time the Nashville Predators had been attacking the Canadiens with six skaters and their goalie pulled—but out he flashed to stand in front of a Michael Bunting shot right before Kaiden Guhle swept the puck out of the slot and officially sealed this fifth straight win.

This was pure desperation. The kind Matheson hasn’t gotten enough credit for in what’s turning out to be a special season for the Canadiens, but also the kind he’s provided night-in, night-out as a leader on the team.

The attention Matheson usually gets is for the type of play he made in the first period, when he took on a bit more risk than he should’ve and got pickpocketed by Filip Forsberg before Steven Stamkos opened the scoring.

But such is life for a player who can take on more risk than the average player — and often must take it on — to access his above-average skill.

Most the time Matheson gets away with it. But when he doesn’t, the mistakes are glaring and costly, and they tend to taint an otherwise clean performance in the eyes of some viewers.

That’s how it ends up being ignored by some that the shot Matheson blocked from Bunting was the seventh one he stopped in Sunday’s game.

Without nearly everything else he did over his 31:46 on the ice, the Canadiens wouldn’t have left Nashville with another win banked.

“We really needed him tonight,” Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki told reporters at Bridgestone Arena afterwards.

The Canadiens have really needed Matheson every night this season, and they’ve needed him in a role he was completely unaccustomed to playing before it started in October.

Matheson has always been an offensive defenceman, but with Lane Hutson’s arrival — the rookie registered his 64^th point of the season on Patrik Laine’s winning goal to tie Chris Chelios’ franchise record and make him the most productive Canadiens defenceman since Andrei Markov posted 64 in the 2008-09 season — he had to become the team’s most defensive one. That meant leaving his place on the first power play to Hutson, it meant giving of most his offensive-zone starts to him too, and it meant doing all that after posting a career-high 11 goals and 62 points one season ago.

But Matheson accepted that for the betterment of the Canadiens, and his good work in that role hasn’t been acknowledged nearly as much as the glaring mistakes he’s made in certain games playing shift-in, shift-out against the best players in the world.

Forsberg and Stamkos are two of them, and they made Matheson pay on Sunday before Cole Caufield scored his 36^th goal, Laine scored his 20^th, and he ended up with the last laugh in this 2-1 win.

Speaking with the 31-year-old last Wednesday, before he was plus-2 and skated 24:52 in a 4-1 win over the Boston Bruins on Thursday, and before he was plus-2 in 26:23 in a win over the Philadelphia Flyers on Saturday, he made it clear he has completely ignored the noise around his game. Good or bad, he said it’s been tuned out and then he repeated what he had told the The Athletic in a conversation just before ours, saying, “My only goal coming into the season was to make the playoffs, and that’s all I’ve been focused on.”

“I’ll do anything I can to make it happen,” he concluded, and his actions have only affirmed that.

Sunday’s game was just another example of it, with Matheson playing such taxing minutes — including 7:51 of the eight the Canadiens spent short-handed.

He had to have been exhausted.

Matheson’s teammates certainly were, with this being a third game in four nights and a second in less than 24 hours — after a long flight, an early-morning arrival, and no real chance to properly adjust to central time.

“We didn’t have our fastball,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis.

His team didn’t even have its changeup.

St. Louis also didn’t have David Savard and Emil Heineman, with both players ruled day-to-day ahead of the game.

Josh Anderson was inserted in Heineman’s place after missing Saturday’s game to be present for the birth of his first child, but to suggest he was fresh would be stretching the truth. Anderson arrived in Nashville several hours after his teammates had gone to bed and played on pure adrenaline.

Arber Xhekaj was rested, and he played in Savard’s place.

But rust of sitting for four straight games as a healthy scratch relegated Xhekaj to less than 10 minutes of ice-time.

The Canadiens were fortunate Dobes wasn’t rusty after last appearing in a game on March 27. He made 36 saves, including five excellent ones that prevented Ryan O’Reilly from scoring his 300^th career goal.

“Doby stood on his head to get us the win,” said Suzuki.

We already know how he felt about Matheson’s effort.

The Pointe-Claire, Que., native laid it all on the line to push the Canadiens a step closer to their goal — and to his.

The win put the Canadiens six points up on the New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings, seven up on the New York Islanders, and eight up on the Columbus Blue Jackets.

They’re giving up a game in hand to all those pursuers, but their desperation has kept them in the driver’s seat of this wild-card race.

Matheson’s desperation kept him on top, too. He made a bad mistake in Sunday’s game, and it was one of many he’s made this season in playing the toughest role outside the net.

But that shouldn’t overshadow the good he’s provided.

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