Jon Cooper runs two-hour skate ahead of Canadiens series

That's a statement in itself. Two hours, two days before a Game 1. Cooper is sending a message.

The Lightning finished the regular season at 50-26-6, 106 points, same as Montreal. Tampa holds the tiebreaker and home ice. Their record at Amalie Arena this season was 26-14-1.

Nikita Kucherov put up 130 points in 76 games. He had 8 power-play goals and 29 power-play assists. There's a reason Cooper spent extra time on the power play Friday.

Darren Raddysh ran that unit from the blue line all season, finishing with 10 power-play goals and 70 total points. That's a weapon the Canadiens cannot afford to hand ammunition to through undisciplined play.

Anthony Cirelli finished with a +38 rating, 2 shorthanded goals, and 2 shorthanded assists. He is the kind of two-way centre who makes opponents pay on both sides of special teams.

The Canadiens bring real offensive heat into this series. Nick Suzuki finished with 101 points. Cole Caufield scored 51 goals, 12 of them game-winners. Lane Hutson posted 78 points including 18 power-play assists.

But their blue line is already cracked before puck drop. Noah Dobson is out indefinitely with an upper-body injury. Alexandre Carrier is listed day-to-day with the same.

Losing two defencemen of that calibre heading into a playoff series is like a boxing corner losing two cornermen before the first bell. The structure behind your skilled forwards matters, especially against a line like Kucherov, Jake Guentzel, and Brandon Hagel.

Guentzel finished with 38 goals and 88 points. Hagel scored 36 goals and was a +34 on the year. Brayden Point only played 63 games, but he still posted 50 points and is a completely different player come April.

In the crease, Andrei Vasilevskiy went .910 with 30 wins and 2 shutouts in 58 starts. Jakub Dobes was .901 in 43 games for Montreal, winning 20. Both goalies held up through a full season.

The difference is what Vasilevskiy has done in previous playoff runs. Dobes has never seen anything like this. That experience gap is real, even if it doesn't show up in any stat column.

The head-to-head history between these two clubs this season tells an interesting story. Montreal lost the first two matchups, 6-1 and then 5-4 in a shootout, before winning the final two, 4-1 and 2-1. The Canadiens figured something out down the stretch.

Montreal went 7-3-0 in their last 10 regular-season games. Tampa was 5-5-0. The momentum clearly favors the visitors on paper. But Cooper just spent two hours on Friday making sure his group doesn't care about regular-season momentum.

Martin St-Louis has built something real in Montreal. Whether Dobes can match Vasilevskiy start for start in a seven-game series, without Dobson anchoring the back end, is the question nobody can answer yet.