Canadiens Are Still Out to Prove They Belong

Montreal, the playoff team with the fewest regular-season points, made the Stanley Cup finals behind its defense. But after losing Game 1 to the reigning champions, it must adapt one more time.

TAMPA, Fla. — The perfect team for these pandemic times dressed in the visiting locker room at Amalie Arena on Monday night. Just as the N.H.L. postseason started to reclaim a scrap of normalcy, with the Canadian bubbles of last summer replaced by games at home venues — and before frothing crowds, no less — along came the Montreal Canadiens. They advanced to the Stanley Cup finals against the Tampa Bay Lightning, the reigning champions, with an interim interim coach, after ousting two of the league’s behemoths, and despite facing elimination not once or twice but three times in their first-round series. Now, this might pique the nice folks in la belle province, but in any other season Montreal — which finished in the bottom half of the N.H.L., with the fewest points of any playoff team — probably wouldn’t have even qualified for the postseason. “They are exactly where they thought they would be,” Lightning Coach Jon Cooper said Monday morning. “They didn’t go the same route, so it looks different because they look like the Cinderella team. But I don’t believe that for a second. And nobody does in our room.”