Canadiens centre Tomas Plekanec skates past as Tampa Bay celebrates a goal during Game 2 on Sunday.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
Failure is a fact of hockey life – even the most accomplished snipers fail to score on 85 per cent of their shots. Then there are droughts. Gifted players manage to pull their way out of the troughs quickly and with regularity; it's what differentiates the merely average from the very good.
Over the weekend, Tampa Bay Lightning centre Steven Stamkos – a lifetime resident of hockey's "exceptional" category – described what it felt like to rediscover his touch.
"This game is about confidence. You score a goal and, all of a sudden, nothing has changed, but your legs feel lighter, you feel better with the puck, things are starting to bounce your way – that's just the way this game goes," he said. And confidence, he added, "is not easy to get, and it's easy to lose."
This is from a guy who has averaged a goal every 5 1/2 since entering the NHL in 2008.
So what do you do if you're a less skilled player? You sweat. And if your lineup carries more of those than your playoff opponent, the temperature starts to get uncomfortably warm.
This is where the Montreal Canadiens find themselves.
The Habs' top-six forwards scored roughly 70 fewer points than the Lightning's top two lines in the regular season, and the disparity has held steady in the playoffs despite Stamkos's power outage – his breakaway goal in Game 2 was his first in nine games, the second-longest drought of his career.
The Canadiens, meanwhile, have scored just 15 goals in eight playoff games. Their leading scorer is defenceman P.K. Subban, which isn't so bad given he put up 60 points in the regular season. But their highest-scoring forward is Torrey Mitchell, with four points in eight games. That's a problem. He's a role player.
In Game 2 against the Lightning on Sunday, Mitchell made a slinky move to go around Tampa's Anton Stralman and bore down on Ben Bishop's net alone. But he wasn't able to score.
The Habs were up 1-0 at the time, and that chance, along with a similar partial breakaway that fell to fourth-liner Brian Flynn, could have led to a more favourable outcome than what turned out to be a 6-2 loss to Tampa.
The problem isn't Flynn or Mitchell; it's that the Habs have trouble on offence. They have one pure goal-scorer in the lineup – Max Pacioretty, who has three in eight games, one of them into an empty net – and perhaps another nascent one in Alex Galchenyuk, although he is mired in a deep funk and has spent time on the fourth line. (he scored an overtime winner in the first round, but hasn't earned a point since).
Otherwise, the Canadiens have industrious if limited offensive threats such as Brendan Gallagher, Tomas Plekanec (who is once again saving his most ineffectual offensive play for the postseason), Dale Weise and Pierre-Alexandre Parenteau.
Contrast that with Stamkos, Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat and Nikita Kucherov. Complementary players such as Ryan Callahan and Valtteri Filppula are exhibiting more skill than any of the Habs.
So to find a foothold in the series, Montreal has to start putting the puck in the net in a building where Tampa has lost only 11 games this year, including two playoff setbacks in Round 1.
Despite their central flaw as a hockey club, the Habs have no shortage of confidence and optimism. Subban even went so far as to say that, absent Tampa's suddenly resurgent power play, "we're the better team out there."
"I think we've made Bishop look a lot better than he's been – there's times when we can expose him a little bit," Subban said, adding: "I think we could easily be up in the series. It's as simple as that."
But they're not. And when you look at the goals-scored column, it's not difficult to understand why.