The Montreal Canadiens clinched a berth in the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the second straight season on Sunday.<\/p>\n
The Canadiens (45-21-10) qualified with the Detroit Red Wings\u2019 5-4 loss to the Minnesota Wild. Montreal finished as the second wild card in the Eastern Conference last season before losing its first-round series against the Washington Capitals in five games.<\/p>\n
Entering their game against the New Jersey Devils on Sunday (7 p.m. ET; RDS, TSN2, MSGSN), the Canadiens have won eight in a row and are tied with the Buffalo Sabres for second in the Atlantic Division with 100 points each, two behind the first-place Tampa Bay Lightning.<\/p>\n
Center Nick Suzuki<\/a>\u00a0leads the Canadiens with 95 points (27 goals, 68 assists) in 76 games, and forward Cole Caufield<\/a>\u00a0ranks second in the NHL with 49 goals, trailing only Nathan MacKinnon<\/a>\u00a0of the Colorado Avalanche (51). Caufield is second for Montreal with 85 points, and defenseman Lane Hutson<\/a> ranks third with 74 points (12 goals, 62 assists).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Montreal Canadiens clinched a berth in the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the second straight season on Sunday.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584681,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194292],"tags":[49,48,2338],"class_list":["post-584680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-montreal","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-montreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}