It should not have happened but it did.
Alain Vigneault should not have “lost” Brendan Smith in the third period of Saturday’s stunning second-guess feast of a Game 2, 6-5 double-overtime defeat in Ottawa. But the coach on Sunday admitted that’s just what happened.
“I was looking for certain matchups and sometimes within a game’s flow, certain players get lost for a couple of minutes and that’s what happened,” Vigneault said when asked why No. 42 had gotten so little time in the third period. “It wasn’t performance-related. Brendan played a good game with bite.