from Pat Hickey of the Montreal Gazette,

The Canadiens did a lot of good things in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup final Wednesday.

They outshot the Tampa Bay Lightning 43-23.

They scored a power-play goal and killed off three Lightning power plays.

They kept Nikita Kucherov, the top scorer in the playoffs, off the scoresheet.

They won more faceoffs than they lost.

But they didn’t get enough pucks past Andrei Vasilevskiy and they lost 3-1 to fall behind 2-0 in the best-of-seven series.

Vasilevskiy made 42 saves as he limited the opposition to fewer than two goals for the 10th time in the playoffs. He lowered his goals-against average to 1.89, with a playoff-best .939 save percentage.

The Canadiens continued to hurt themselves with bad decisions. With time running out in the second period, the usually reliable Phil Danault failed to get the puck through the neutral zone and the result was a Tampa Bay rush that resulted in a go-ahead goal by Blake Coleman with three-10ths of a second remaining.

continued