No. 5 Pittsburgh Penguins vs. No. 12 Montreal Canadiens
Penguins: 40-23-6, 623 points percentage
Canadiens: 31-31-9, .500 points percentage
Season series: PIT 2-1-0; MTL 1-1-1
The Montreal Canadiens have dealt with the perception of being the least deserving team in the Stanley Cup Qualifiers.
Yet they have a unique opportunity to reach the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time since 2017, even with the fewest wins and lowest points percentage of the 24 participating teams when the season was paused March 12 due to concerns surrounding the coronavirus.
“The outside opinion about our group doesn’t matter one bit,” forward Brendan Gallagher said. “What’s important to us is how we feel in our locker room. As long as our guys have confidence and we believe that we can achieve this, it’s possible. If you lose that belief, it’s not possible. We have a task [against] Pittsburgh, and that’s where our focus is. You make your own odds.”
The Penguins were first in the Metropolitan Division on Feb. 18 after a 23-6-2 run that began Dec. 4, despite injuries to forwards Sidney Crosby (28 games missed), Evgeni Malkin (14) and Jake Guentzel (30). They retain the core of the team that won the Stanley Cup in 2016 and 2017, with Crosby, Malkin and defenseman Kris Letang each looking for their fourth NHL championship.
“It would be unbelievable,” Letang said. “When you have the chance to be on a team like ours and to be successful like we’ve been, to have another championship would solidify what we’ve been able to accomplish in Pittsburgh.”
Game breakers
Canadiens: Forward Jonathan Drouin scored 15 points (seven goals, eight assists) in the first 19 games of the season, when Montreal averaged 3.53 goals per game and was 11-5-3. He then missed three months after surgery for a torn tendon in his wrist. The Canadiens were 15-18-4 without him, including two eight-game winless streaks, and scored 2.81 goals per game.
Penguins: Malkin started the season in better condition than he was in 2018-19 and led Pittsburgh with 74 points (25 goals, 49 assists) in 55 games, including 38 (11 goals, 27 assists) in Crosby’s absence to help the Penguins go 18-6-4. He stayed in shape during the pause by chopping wood in Miami, and his line with Jason Zucker and Bryan Rust was impressive during intrasquad scrimmages. A dominant Malkin combined with the forward depth added before the NHL Trade Deadline on Feb. 24 (Zucker, Conor Sheary, Evan Rodrigues, Patrick Marleau) could help the Penguins make this a short series.
Canadiens:Carey Price‘s regular-season numbers were pedestrian (58 games, 27-25-6, 2.79 goals-against average, .909 save percentage). He also was tied for third in the NHL with four shutouts, played more minutes than anyone (3,439:49), and was second to Connor Hellebuyck of the Winnipeg Jets in saves (1,595) and shots against (1,755). Price remains capable of stealing a series in his 13th NHL season. If he falters, Charlie Lindgren, Cayden Primeau and Michael McNiven are competing to be the backup, which coach Claude Julien said July 15 was “a really nice problem to have right now.”
Penguins:Matt Murray and Tristan Jarry each has a chance to start Game 1, coach Mike Sullivan said July 18. Murray is a two-time Cup winner but went 20-11-5 with a 2.87 GAA and an NHL career-worst .899 save percentage in 38 games. Jarry was 12-2-0 with a 1.78 GAA, a .941 save percentage and three shutouts in 14 games (13 starts) from Nov. 16-Dec. 30. Jarry started 22 of 35 games from Dec. 4-Feb. 26.
Numbers to know
Canadiens: Price was tied for 31st with Jonathan Quick of the Los Angeles Kings in GAA among NHL goalies who played at least 20 games, but he had a 2.32 GAA and .929 save percentage in three games against the Penguins.
Penguins: Pittsburgh has scored 3.60 goals per game in its past 10 regular-season games against Montreal.
X-factors
Canadiens: Phillip Danault quietly has evolved into a reliable center often matched against the best of the opposition. He’ll have to deal with Crosby and Malkin and lead a group of centers (Max Domi, Nick Suzuki, Jesperi Kotkaniemi and potentially Jake Evans) without NHL playoff experience. Danault was seventh in voting for the Selke Trophy, given to the best defensive forward in the League last season and could finish higher after this season. Montreal needs him at that level in the Qualifiers.
Penguins: John Marino, a sixth-round pick (No. 154) of the Edmonton Oilers in the 2015 NHL Draft, made the Penguins straight out of Harvard University and was fourth among NHL rookie defensemen with 26 points (six goals, 20 assists) in 56 games, and his plus-17 rating was tied for second with Philippe Myers of the Philadelphia Flyers (Adam Fox of the New York Rangers, plus-22). The 23-year-old averaged 20:15 of ice time, third among Penguins defensemen, and stabilized a veteran group that includes Letang, 33, Jack Johnson, 33, Justin Schultz, 30, and Brian Dumoulin, 28.
“We can be underdogs all day. That’s fine. It’s a situation that we’ve all been in before and nobody should take offense to that and no one should listen to that. I think the belief in this room is anything can happen. You look at the history of the Stanley Cup (Playoffs) over the years and strange things have happened. We’ve got a belief that anything’s possible and we’ll see what happens.” –– Canadiens defenseman Shea Weber
“We’re going to stay in the moment and not get ahead of ourselves, control what we can each and every day. I’m excited about this group, and I’m really excited about the opportunity we have in front of us.” — Penguins coach Mike Sullivan
Will win if …
Canadiens: Price reverts to his form from the 2017 playoffs, when he had a 1.86 GAA and .933 save percentage in six games. The Canadiens averaged 1.83 goals per game in a six-game loss to the New York Rangers in the Eastern Conference First Round and need to score more to defeat the Penguins. Tomas Tatar (22 goals) and Gallagher (22) were the only Montreal players to score more than 17 goals this season.
Penguins: The old guard (Crosby, Malkin, Letang) and new blood (Marino, Zucker) jell quickly, Guentzel shows no signs of rust in his first NHL games since Dec. 30, and Pittsburgh doesn’t look past its opponent.
Paul Byron — Jesperi Kotkaniemi — Artturi Lehkonen
Jordan Weal — Max Domi — Dale Weise
Ben Chiarot — Shea Weber
Brett Kulak — Jeff Petry
Victor Mete — Xavier Ouellet
Carey Price
Charlie Lindgren
Scratched:Charles Hudon, Gustav Olofsson, Christian Folin, Noah Juulsen, Jake Evans, Josh Brook, Ryan Poehling, Cale Fleury, Alex Belzile, Laurent Dauphin, Cayden Primeau, Michael McNiven
PARIS (AP) — French judicial authorities are investigating the disappearance of two Paralympic athletes from Congo who recently competed in the Paris Games, the prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Bobigny confirmed on Thursday.
Prosecutors opened the investigation on Sept. 7, after members of the athletes’ delegation warned authorities of their disappearance two days before.
Le Parisien newspaper reported that shot putter Mireille Nganga and Emmanuel Grace Mouambako, a visually impaired sprinter who was accompanied by a guide, went missing on Sept. 5, along with a third person.
The athletes’ suitcases were also gone but their passports remained with the Congolese delegation, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not allowed to speak publicly about the case.
The Paralympic Committee of the Democratic Republic of Congo did not respond to requests for information from The Associated Press.
Nganga — who recorded no mark in the seated javelin and shot put competitions — and Mouambako were Congo’s flag bearers at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, organizers said.
An investigator gave the World Anti-Doping Agency a pass on its handling of the inflammatory case involving Chinese swimmers, but not without hammering away at the “curious” nature of WADA’s “silence” after examining Chinese actions that did not follow rules designed to safeguard global sports.
WADA on Thursday released the full decision from Eric Cottier, the Swiss investigator it appointed to analyze its handling of the case involving the 23 Chinese swimmers who remained eligible despite testing positive for performance enhancers in 2021.
In echoing wording from an interim report issued earlier this summer, Cottier said it was “reasonable” that WADA chose not to appeal the Chinese anti-doping agency’s explanation that the positives came from contamination.
“Taking into consideration the particularities of the case, (WADA) appears … to have acted in accordance with the rules it has itself laid out for anti-doping organizations,” Cottier wrote.
But peppered throughout his granular, 56-page analysis of the case was evidence and reminders of how WADA disregarded some of China’s violations of anti-doping protocols. Cottier concluded this happened more for the sake of expediency than to show favoritism toward the Chinese.
“In retrospect at least, the Agency’s silence is curious, in the face of a procedure that does not respect the fundamental rules, and its lack of reaction is surprising,” Cottier wrote of WADA’s lack of fealty to the world anti-doping code.
Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and one of WADA’s fiercest critics, latched onto this dynamic, saying Cottier’s information “clearly shows that China did not follow the rules, and that WADA management did nothing about it.”
One of the chief complaints over the handling of this case was that neither WADA nor the Chinese gave any public notice upon learning of the positive tests for the banned heart medication Temozolomide, known as TMZ.
The athletes also were largely kept in the dark and the burden to prove their innocence was taken up by Chinese authorities, not the athletes themselves, which runs counter to what the rulebook demands.
Despite the criticisms, WADA generally welcomed the report.
“Above all, (Cottier) reiterated that WADA showed no bias towards China and that its decision not to appeal the cases was reasonable based on the evidence,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli said. “There are however certainly lessons to be learned by WADA and others from this situation.”
Tygart said “this report validates our concerns and only raises new questions that must be answered.”
Cottier expanded on doubts WADA’s own chief scientist, Olivier Rabin, had expressed over the Chinese contamination theory — snippets of which were introduced in the interim report. Rabin was wary of the idea that “a few micrograms” of TMZ found in the kitchen at the hotel where the swimmers stayed could be enough to cause the group contamination.
“Since he was not in a position to exclude the scenario of contamination with solid evidence, he saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities,” Cottier wrote.
Though recommendations for changes had been expected in the report, Cottier made none, instead referring to several comments he’d made earlier in the report.
Key among them were his misgivings that a case this big was largely handled in private — a breach of custom, if not the rules themselves — both while China was investigating and after the file had been forwarded to WADA. Not until the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD reported on the positives were any details revealed.
“At the very least, the extraordinary nature of the case (23 swimmers, including top-class athletes, 28 positive tests out of 60 for a banned substance of therapeutic origin, etc.), could have led to coordinated and concerted reflection within the Agency, culminating in a formal and clearly expressed decision to take no action,” the report said.
WADA’s executive committee established a working group to address two more of Cottier’s criticisms — the first involving what he said was essentially WADA’s sloppy recordkeeping and lack of formal protocol, especially in cases this complex; and the second a need to better flesh out rules for complex cases involving group contamination.
The French league’s legal commission has ordered Paris Saint-Germain to pay Kylian Mbappé the 55 million euros ($61 million) in unpaid wages that he claims he’s entitled to, the league said Thursday.
The league confirmed the decision to The Associated Press without more details, a day after the France superstar rejected a mediation offer by the commission in his dispute with his former club.
