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First there was anger and disappointment, which is perfectly appropriate under the circumstances. Then out came the metaphorical cat-o'-nine-tails.

Great athletes place high demands on themselves and when they fail to meet them, the tendency is toward self-criticism that makes the stuff rained down on them by fans and pundits seem trivial.

Montreal Canadiens goaltender Carey Price has piled up enough credits over the past two years – a run that includes franchise records, an absurd highlight-reel and an Olympic gold medal – that he could easily have deflected or at least shared responsibility for his club's second-round playoff exit.

Instead, he claimed it all for himself.

"I didn't play well enough for us to win the series. I think that's basically more or less what it comes down to," he said shortly after the Habs were eliminated by Tampa Bay. "We lost a lot of tight games. I just needed to make that one more save in all the games that we lost and I didn't do that."

Perfectionists always find flaws in their game, but it's more than a little ridiculous for the goalie who is the best at his position in the league and one of precious few consistently great things about this club to point the finger squarely at his own chest.

Emotions are particularly raw in a losing locker room, and Price's teammates were quick to gently disagree with him.

"I don't care what Carey says, we need to be better around him and support him more. I think too many times this year he's bailed us out and that's gotta change moving forward if we want to be a successful team in the regular season and the post-season," said defenceman P.K. Subban. "If we expect him to play the way he's played this year every year, it's unfair. There's going to be ups and downs, and it's tough to be at that level every single game. He's managed to do it this year, but we have to realize our job is to make his job easier, not to make it more difficult."

That said, Subban added: "Everybody needs to be hard on themselves; everybody needs to have that mentality. He's vocal about it and that's great. That's what you want. "

The star defenceman also followed Price's lead in offering a critical assessment of his own performance: "I'm sure there's a lot of players in here that feel they could have played better. I'm definitely one of them. I'm not going to sit here and say that I was at my best."

Fundamentally, however, both men are wrong in their assessments. They didn't cost the Habs this series: their pop-gun offence did.

Subban is an active participant in that offence – and particularly in a power-play that went 2-for-36 in the playoffs (5.6 per cent, 15th best in the league) – but he also led the team in scoring in the playoffs while logging massive ice time and playing hard minutes against the opposition's top line.

Max Pacioretty, who missed the beginning of the post-season while recovering from a concussion, turned in a respectable total of five goals; frequent linemate Brendan Gallagher added three.

But centres David Desharnais, Tomas Plekanec and Lars Eller put up dismal offensive numbers, as did wingers Alex Galchenyuk and Pierre-Alexandre Parenteau.

You can't win 0-0, and the fact is the Habs didn't score enough goals this post-season, fewer than two per game on average.

Parenteau hit the post – which the Habs did a dozen times if they did it once against Tampa – on a power-play in the second period of game six.

"I think if I bury that, it's a different game. It's 2-1 instead of 3-0 the other way. It was a huge turning point," he said mournfully after the game.

With the game scoreless in the first, Plekanec had a glorious opportunity in front of Ben Bishop. He took his time, picked his spot – and shot it into the goalie's pad.

"It's the same story as pretty much the whole series. I thought I had a hell of a chance there, should have put it in. We would have been up by one. [Gallagher] had a good chance. We could have scored goals. Then they did, and since the second period we started pressing, forcing the plays too much," he said.

It's at times like these that the Habs' lack of snipers – proper, bona fide finishers – becomes more glaring.

There is talent in this lineup, certainly, but where the Lightning had Stamkos, Johnson, Palat and Kucherov, the Habs had Pacioretty and perhaps Gallagher.

"That's the one thing you learn about the playoffs: you've got to bury your chances. I think individually we've all had chances to bury and whether it's bad luck or not being sharp enough, we didn't do enough things well to finish 'em, to win," Subban said. "We did a lot of good things to be in the series, but to win the series you've got to finish. You've got to be great, and we weren't great."

Coach Michel Therrien was sombre in defeat, but tried to put the series defeat in perspective.

The Habs, he said, are a team in transition. While it may not feel like it right now, he added, progress was made this year.

Parenthetically, this is not an idea that sits well with Subban, who said "[On Wednesday] I turn 26 and the years seem to fly by… I can't focus on saying we need to wait a couple of years before we can contend. We need to contend now."

It's Therrien's job to shepherd his players toward that goal, and his sense in defeat was that the fullness of time will reveal benefits from a playoff run that ended a round or two sooner than his players would have wanted or expected.

"You can't just look at one game; you have to look at the whole season, the whole playoffs. We're a team that's in transition, as we said at the beginning of the season. We took big steps. We would have liked to have gone farther. But we didn't lose the series tonight," he said. "You look at Game 1, we should have won that game. Game 3, same thing. Eventually those things catch up to you, and they caught up to us."

There is another important aspect to this season's Habs: With younger players handed prominent leadership roles and a raft of new faces added to the mix, the feeling in the room – genuine, as far as anyone outside it can tell – is that a true camaraderie has developed.

The coach called it "special chemistry."

The happiest teams are generally the teams that win. Which is probably why it hurts so much when they don't.

"We had a lot of fun all season long," Price said. "It's just kind of hard to choke down and look back on that right at this moment."

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