Have the Senators Solved Carey Price After Game 5 Scoring Outburst vs Canadiens?

After the third game of their first-round series against the Montreal Canadiens, the Ottawa Senators were a little like an action star from a Hollywood blockbuster dangling off a cliff, hanging on to a suspended rope by one hand. They trailed 3-0, things looked bleak, and there was no margin for error; even the smallest mistake would be the end of the story.

There still isn’t any margin for error, but the Sens have improved their position. The 1-0 win in Game 4 gave them a little life, but their dramatic offensive outburst in Game 5 was even more important. If we extend the metaphor, Game 4 was the Senators getting both hands on the rope, while Game 5 was the moment they started climbing.

Most significantly, Game 5 was the first time Canadiens goaltender Carey Price really looked vulnerable.

Price, who, earlier on Friday, was named by the NHL as one of three finalists for the NHL’s Vezina Trophy, is arguably the best goaltender in hockey right now. And the Senators know it.

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“He's been outstanding in this series,” Sens winger Clarke MacArthur told the Ottawa Sun’s Bruce Garrioch. “He never gets amped up. He's always calm and cool in there. We need him to slip up a little bit for us.”

It’s no wonder MacArthur was impressed. Entering Game 5, Price had a 3-1-0 playoff record with a 0.946 save percentage. In the previous four games of the series (which included some overtime action), he had surrendered just seven goals in total.

So it’s a big deal that the Senators managed to put five past him on Friday.

Ottawa didn’t do anything revolutionary. They followed the very simple plan that coaches at all levels of the game hammer into their players when facing a red-hot goaltender: Go hard to the net. Blast the puck into traffic.

Four of the Senators’ five goals followed that basic outline. The worst of the bunch from Price’s perspective was probably the first one, a Bobby Ryan shot from a terrible angle:

But as much as no goalie wants to allow a goal from where Ryan released that shot, it’s easy to understand why Price was beaten.

Freeze the video at the 10-second mark as Ryan releases the puck. There are six bodies in the line of fire, and defenceman Cody Ceci is pinching in as fast as he can. As the shot itself arrived at the net, Mika Zibanejad did his level best to get the blade of his stick on it, poking it to the same area in space as Price’s glove is going. It’s hard for any goalie to pick up the puck with that kind of chaos around him.

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It was a template the Senators followed again and again. Patrick Wiercioch’s game-winner came from nearly the centre of the right faceoff circle, and there were seven bodies crammed into the relatively small space between the Ottawa defenceman and Price.

Erik Karlsson’s second-period power-play marker went through a double Ottawa screen. Ryan’s second goal of the night saw him redirect a Mike Hoffman point shot past Price; both he and Alex Chiasson were causing havoc directly in front of Montreal’s goalie on that occasion.

It’s an obvious strategy to attempt in the postseason, and as The Globe and Mail’s Sean Gordon noted in an excellent piece on Thursday, it’s the same one that led to the overtime winner in Game 4 which kept Ottawa alive:

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One of the adjustments the Senators made in the two games in Ottawa was to station their forwards closer to the Montreal net.

The gambit is roughly as old as the game itself, but it paid off in crunch time in the third period when Mika Zibanejad was able to shield Price’s view of Mike Hoffman’s zippy wrister from the left faceoff circle.

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The Senators won't be able to put five goals past the best goalie in hockey every night—this is only the fourth time in 71 games that Price has allowed that many—but they don’t need to.

Their starter, Craig Anderson, has surrendered all of three goals on 123 shots over his three starts. Montreal has a bunch of defencemen capable of putting a hard shot on net from the point, but their (generally) smaller forwards aren’t as good at creating chaos as Ottawa’s.

The one goal Anderson allowed on Friday was from the same family as the ones that beat Price, with Tom Gilbert putting a fast shot through a Dale Weise screen. But the Habs weren’t able to do that often enough, and Anderson stopped everything he saw, including a second-period breakaway attempt by Tomas Plekanec. 

If the Senators can carry on with at least some facsimile of Friday's successful strategy, they might yet pull off a comeback win in this series. If not, they’ll have shown Montreal’s future opponents exactly what is necessary to beat the formidable Price.

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com.

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.