Not quite a wash, we were supposed to beat the Habs....
The idea of games you need to win though, hockey isn't really like that, any team can beat any team on a given night, that's just the fun of hockey. You can get outplayed severely and still come away with the win or vice versa.
Good teams will lose games they "should" win.
Relying on bounces to me is getting outplayed and hoping for the double deflection own goal to sneak one past the goalie, not creating chances and expecting that some of them go post in rather than post out. I don't think we were relying on bounces to try and win that game, we were creating a lot of chances, eventually those go in.
If we play the rest of the season the way we played NJD last night, we should win a lot more games than we lose. I didn't like the way we played once NJ started to play a prevent game, we need to find a way to break through their defense without giving up as much as we did, but outside of that, it was a very well played game imo.
The trick is to play the way we did last night consistently, we didn't do that against the Habs, and we only managed to do it for one period against Florida. The game against LA was a bit loose at times, I think they cleaned that up against NJD.