Montreal deserved to win the game.

They knew it. The Tampa Bay Lightning knew it.

But – as a large group of fans began to post on social media after Wednesday's dramatic, last second Habs loss – sometimes deserve's got nothing to do with it.

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(Our thanks to Clint Eastwood for the quote. William Munny must have been a hockey fan.)

The Canadiens were on the wrong end of one of the toughest losses we've witnessed this postseason in a Game 3 they had to have. They played with desperation and controlled the play. They had more scoring chances, even if this was a game without many.

And the Lightning were not happy – at all – with their performance.

"It was a weird game for us," coach Jon Cooper said afterward. "We went into a 52-minute prevent defence [after getting the game's first goal]. It was ludicrous."

This wasn't Tampa's first poor showing this postseason. They struggled in Game 7 against Detroit, for example, but goaltender Ben Bishop came up huge and they managed to advance on the strength of a couple opportunistic goals.

The Lightning may have had (slightly) fewer points than Montreal during the regular season, but they are one of the deepest teams in the league and a Stanley Cup favourite because they can beat you in a variety of ways. They were the highest scoring team in the NHL during the season, largely because of their nearly unmatched depth. So when, say, Steven Stamkos is cold in Round 1, they can survive because their other top players can step up and contribute.

Their second line, led by Tyler Johnson, is as good as most teams' first.

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They also have a very deep blueline, led by Anton Stralman and Victor Hedman – who didn't get enough credit for the great play he made on the winner on Wednesday – and two goaltenders who are more than capable of going on a run.

Montreal doesn't have that combination. They don't beat you in a variety of ways. You can argue they were the better team in this game, and even in the series as a whole, but the reality is the Habs lack anything close to Tampa's dynamic offensive talents and they relied way too heavily on Carey Price to win games all season.

Minus his ridiculous save percentage, they would have been dangerously close to an average team, with a goal differential close to nil.

That's what they look like, offensively, in this series. Bishop has played very well, but for all the Habs shots, the Grade A chances often aren't there.

Tellingly, they have only four goals in the three games.

According to one analyst named Olivier Bouchard, Montreal has had 56 scoring chances in total in the series, 17 more than the Lightning. But, he explains, few of the Habs chances have come on rebounds or plays forcing Bishop to move side to side, which is when holes open up in the 6-foot-7 netminder.

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Stylistically, the Habs weren't a pretty team this year. They were weak territorially – one of only three teams with a sub-50-per-cent possession rating to make the playoffs – and finished 20th in goals per game. It's been difficult this spring to flip the switch against better teams than they faced regularly during the season.

That's the reality of the postseason: By Round 2, there aren't any easy outs left. And the more ways you can win these very tight games the better.

Tampa has a lot of options there. You can see them using them, even when they have off nights like Wednesday. Montreal doesn't, not nearly to that extent, as they leaned on Price so often to close the door.

It's why he'll likely win the Hart Trophy in June. But it can't help them win this series if they're producing barely a goal a game.

The other thing you can clearly see working for the Lightning is the trust they have in their youth, which is increasingly becoming a must in an NHL built on skill and speed. Johnson scored the game winner and has been a huge factor in this postseason, but Cooper hasn't hesitated to play the likes of Alex Killorn – Tampa's top minute forward, at more than 20 minutes a night – Ondrej Palat, Nikita Kucherov and Andrej Sustr.

All are in their early 20s, all have developed under this coach – both in the AHL and now with the Lightning – and all are fully comfortable with a system that promotes possession and focuses on the creation of offence.

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Brendan Gallagher, meanwhile, is the only really young player that Habs coach Michel Therrien seems comfortable heaping ice time on (18 minutes a game), unless you count PK Subban (who's 26 next week) and Max Pacioretty (who's already there).

Alex Galchenyuk, in particular, appears stifled playing Montreal's monotonous dump-and-chase and was given only 13 minutes in Game 3. The Habs also haven't gotten much of anything from Jacob De La Rose and Devante Smith-Pelly this postseason.

No one else under 26 years old is getting meaningful minutes for this team. And some veterans like Andrei Markov (36), Alexei Emelin (29) and others are playing too much.

That said, it's undeniable that this series deserves to be closer than three games to none. Montreal has played better in these three games than they typically did during the season and than they did in getting swept in the season series by Tampa.

But their lack of offensive depth is showing. (Torrey Mitchell is their highest scoring forward in the postseason with four points in nine games.) The lack of dynamism in what Therrien calls their "grind game" system is showing, with this link providing a good explanation of the finer points there.

Their lack of trust in their youth is showing, too, especially if you look at other series where rookies (!) like Johnny Gaudreau, Evgeny Kuznetsov, Sam Bennett and Andre Burakovsky have played a huge role in breaking open tight games.

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You need that in this parity-filled salary cap era: cheap depth producing breakthrough moments at key times.

The Habs may have been a 110-point team during the season, but so much of that was because of Price and, by definition, he can only be a one-facet weapon. He can't score, he can't change their system, and he can't be so airtight every night that his team can be competitive in a series with four goals in three games.

That said the bizarre thing about Montreal's undoing in this series and these playoffs is that it's a reversal of how they won a lot of games this season.

Sometimes hockey is like that, and you have to prepare for it. You have to have enough weapons (in personnel and in your system) that, if you outplay a team one night, there's only a small chance you come up empty.

The Canadiens don't have that certainty, and barring a historic comeback, it'll cost them here.

And it'll lead to an awful lot of soul searching in the summer.