Through five games, the opening-round playoff series between the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators was all about goaltending.
Game Six was no different.
After the dominant performance of Senators goalie Craig Anderson in Games Four and Five, the pendulum swung back toward the Canadiens’ netminder, Carey Price. Just 
two days after giving up five goals on 25 shots in Game Five, Price stopped all 43 shots he faced en route to a 2-0 shutout and series-clinching victory.
Montreal came out flying at the start of the game, apparently hoping to negate the home-ice advantage by taking the crowd out of the game. Anderson held off an early flurry of Canadiens scoring chances, and the Senators rallied with the support of the Ottawa faithful.
They drew two penalties in the frame, but were unable to connect on the ensuing power plays. Each goalie faced 13 shots in the period, with all but one of them being turned aside.
Canadiens forward Brendan Gallagher opened the scoring at 13:26 with a goal that shouldn’t have counted. A shot from Montreal defenseman Greg Pateryn was sailing high and wide and narrowly missed Gallagher’s head. Gallagher spun to avoid the shot, and in the process his stick came up above his shoulders. The puck struck the shaft of his stick, which deadened its momentum and changed its direction. Spinning back towards Anderson, Gallagher was able to locate the puck and backhand it out of mid-air, this time at waist-level, and into the empty half of the Senators net.
Apparently, nobody on the ice (except for Gallagher, presumably) saw the high stick. None of the officials called it and none of the Senators protested. Had instant replay been invoked, the goal almost certainly would have been disallowed.
“You could just see him before the game, the look he had, the focus that he had, he was going to put in a good performance,” said Gallagher, who opened the scoring at 13:26 of the first period. “Forty-three saves. That’s pretty impressive, road building in an elimination game. You come to expect it, but you can’t take it for granted. It’s pretty impressive what he did.”
The Canadiens caught another break in the second period when the Senators thought they had scored the tying goal. At 6:55 Price stopped a slap shot from Mark Borowiecki and appeared to have the rebound corralled against his chest.
Referee Brad Watson, positioned on the other side of the net and screened by Price’s body, blew the play dead just as a diving Jean-Gabriel Pageau swept the loose puck into the net. The Senators protested, but the whistle had clearly blown before the puck entered the net. From where Watson was, he couldn’t see that the puck had dropped to the ice beside Price.
Senators coach Dave Cameron, speaking after the game, ascribed the quick whistle to “bad puck luck”.
That would be all the luck the Canadiens would need to finally close out this series. The story was all about Carey Price the rest of the way.
Having been named a finalist for the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goaltender prior to his Game Five shellacking, Price showed his true mettle over the last two periods. He shut the door on the Senators for the rest of the game, despite the Canadiens being outshot 16-3 and 14-4 in the second and third periods, respectively. Ottawa had nine shots in the game’s final three minutes, including a late power play and an extra-attacker advantage.
“The team wanted this one,” Price said. “When you’re up 3-0 in a series, you want to close it out. They’re a good hockey team. They pushed us; they played well those past few games. [Goalie Craig] Anderson played extremely well; even tonight he played real well. We just found a way to will one out.”
Price stopped everything that was thrown at him. Max Pacioretty closed out the scoring with a long-distance empty-netter with 0.3 seconds remaining on the clock, securing the game and the series for Montreal.
“This team has been a real treat to say you’ve been the head coach of them,” said Senators coach Dave Cameron. “I’m extremely proud of this group … after the disappointment of (the loss) is digested, it’s always a lot easier as a coach when your team has emptied its tank, and that team emptied its tank for me for three months.”
Montreal will next play the winner of the series between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Detroit Red Wings, which Detroit currently leads three games to two.
“Right now it’s very, very empty,” Senators captain Erik Karlsson said. “We’ve been playing so hard for the past few months here that I don’t think we really expected it to end this fast.
“For our team, for what we have in here, I think we had a great season. I think we should be happy where we are. Looking back, we shouldn’t really be in the playoffs to begin with. The run we made was unbelievable, and it was a lot of fun and everybody grew enormously from that.
“That’s what we’ve got to carry on going into next season. We know we’re a better team now.”
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