"I thought our team didn't play a bad game," Canadiens coach Claude Julien said. "It was a real up-and-down kind of game, physical, grinding. I like the way we just stuck with it, even if we fell behind 2-0, we came back in the second, we didn't play a bad period. We had some chances and maybe could have used a bit of luck there. But we had chances, we came back and we tied the game up, we got momentum.
"There's a lot of good things to talk about tonight, but it's really tarnished by the loss at the end of the day."
Backes scored his first goal of the season to give the Bruins a 1-0 lead at 13:01. He stripped the puck from Canadiens rookie forward Jesperi Kotkaniemi inside the blue line and then drove the slot and scored on a wrist shot for his second point in 18 games.