Cooking and baking are very different things. When you cook, you can be creative. You can add a little extra of this or a little less of that and it doesn't fundamentally change the dish. When you bake, however, you're less an artist and more a scientist. Baking is precise. If you know how ingredients work on a scientific level, then you’ll likely know when to add flour to provide more structure or eggs to act as a leavening agent. You'll know how much baking powder to add to get your cake to rise properly and how to work a dough so it doesn't get tough.
The thing is, even when you follow a recipe exactly, outside factors, like oven temperature, the material of your baking dish; sometimes even the composition of the water you add can affect the outcome. Experienced bakers learn to know their own equipment and what to expect from it.
If you apply the kitchen metaphor to hockey, the regular season is cooking with lots of adjustments to taste. It's a time to experiment and try bold things. The playoffs are baking. They require chemistry, diligence and attention to detail. Sometimes the temperature of a game impacts the final product and the mixture has to be just right.
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The first thing you do as a baker is check your ingredients and make sure you have everything you need. In the playoffs, a winning recipe needs just the right pieces. There must be skill for scoring goals, discipline to stay out of the penalty box, grit to win puck battles and physical confrontations, hockey sense to avoid costly mistakes, a reliable goalie and, perhaps most importantly, heart. A player with heart, who's willing to do whatever it takes to win, is the secret ingredient in making a champion.
When Martin St.Louis looks at the tape of the second game against Tampa, he'll be looking for the missing ingredient in the playoff mix. What made the Canadiens completely fall apart in OT? Perhaps Kirby Dach's laconic loss of his man was the glaring mistake that cost the game, but he wasn't the only one looking tentative and tight in overtime.
An infusion of heart might have made a difference. Perhaps someone more dogged than Dach would have worked harder to be in a better defensive position on that play. And nobody in Montreal is as dogged as Brendan Gallagher.
Sure, Gally's not the player he was when he was 20. He's not as fast and not as consistent a pest as he used to be. His finish around the net isn't quite as good. But that's in the regular season when precision isn't necessarily the goal. This is the playoffs. Gallagher knows his career is winding down. He wants to win a Stanley Cup before he retires and he will sacrifice whatever it takes to make that happen while he still can.
A player like Dach or Zachary Bolduc might be physically bigger, but they often don't play like it. So St.Louis has to decide if his recipe needs a more active ingredient. With Gallagher, he knows he's getting heart, net presence and determination to prove himself one more time. That's a potent combination at this time of year.
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Josh Anderson is, perhaps, the perfect model of what a real playoff competitor looks like. He uses his speed and size to disrupt the opponent, and his banging, crashing play has helped him produce desperately-needed goals. Nobody can sustain that level of intensity and aggression for a full season, so Anderson paces himself until it's really needed. He levels up in the post-season.
That's what the other players who are in the lineup for their size and ability have to learn. You can't just continue what you did in the regular season. That was cooking time. Now it's time to bake, and players like Gallagher bring just what the chef ordered.
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