Canadiens vie to halt skid vs. Panthers, stay in wild-card race
Mar 28, 2025; Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; Montreal Canadiens right wing Cole Caufield (13) looks on against the Carolina Hurricanes during the second period at Lenovo Center. Mandatory Credit: James Guillory-Imagn Images Despite losing five games in a row, the Montreal Canadiens continue to be among a handful of teams in the hunt for the final wild-card spot from the Eastern Conference.
The Canadiens will try to keep pace when they visit the Florida Panthers on Sunday afternoon in Sunrise, Fla.
Montreal (33-30-9, 75 points) lost 4-1 to the Carolina Hurricanes on Friday in the third stop of its four-game trip. The Canadiens also lost the night before, 6-4, to the Philadelphia Flyers.
The string of losses has kept the Canadiens in a three-way tie with the Columbus Blue Jackets and New York Rangers for the final wild-card spot.
“You can’t dwell on it,” Montreal forward Cole Caufield said. “To say we’d be in this position at the start of the year, we’d grab that and do whatever it takes to be in this position. We can’t take it for granted. Every game matters. Every game counts. The next one is the most important.”
The Canadiens, who beat Florida, 3-1, in Montreal on March 15 behind 21 saves from Sam Montembeault, will turn around and host the Panthers again on Tuesday.
The Canadiens will then face three straight non-playoff teams, the Boston Bruins, Flyers and Nashville Predators.
Montreal defenseman Kaiden Guhle, who returned against Carolina after missing 21 games with a quad injury, said the team needs to get back to the style that made it successful during stretches this season.
“Our forecheck is our DNA,” Guhle said. “When we’re suffocating teams, I feel like we have the best forecheck in the league, and we have some really good skaters, some big bodies that get in there and make it really hard for their D to make clean plays, and I think that’s something that we’re struggling to get consistency with right now.”
The Panthers (44-25-3, 91 points) have won two in a row after posting a 2-1 overtime victory against the visiting Utah Hockey Club on Friday.
That win came five days after a 4-3 shootout victory against the Pittsburgh Penguins in the opener of the three-game homestand.
Florida has won seven in a row at home.
The Panthers went 4-for-4 on the penalty kill against Utah to improve to 35-for-39 this month.
“I think it’s been pretty solid the whole year,” Florida defenseman Niko Mikkola said of the penalty kill. “(Our opponents) have gotten some late goals, and that’s probably been the issue. We need the whole two minutes and to clear the puck. The last month, it’s been working.”
Brad Marchand played his first game for the Panthers on Friday since he was traded from the Bruins on March 7 and then needed time to recover from an upper-body injury. The 16-year veteran forward had the primary assist on the overtime winner by Sam Bennett.
“He hasn’t played for a month now and he steps right in and is dominating and controlling the game,” Bennett said of Marchand. “That’s tough to do in your first game back, especially on a new team. I think he’s going to fit here real, real nice.”
-Field Level Media
Tech
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Sports
Behind Mark Vientos' clutch hit, Mets edge Twins, snap 12-game skid
Apr 22, 2026; New York City, New York, USA; New York Mets catcher Francisco Alvarez (4) watches his RBI double against the Minnesota Twins during the fourth inning at Citi Field. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-Imagn Images Mark Vientos redeemed himself for an earlier baserunning miscue by delivering the tiebreaking single in the eighth inning, and the host New York Mets snapped a 12-game losing streak with a 3-2 win over the Minnesota Twins on Wednesday.
The losing streak was the longest for the Mets since a 12-game skid from Aug. 10-23, 2002.
However, the much-needed victory may have been costly for New York, which lost shortstop Francisco Lindor due to left calf tightness after he scored from first on Francisco Alvarez’s double in the fourth inning.
Lindor, who was 2-for-2 with an RBI infield single in the first, was injured the same night Juan Soto returned from a 15-game absence caused by a strained right calf. The Mets won their first three games after Soto was injured on April 3 before beginning their losing streak.
Soto went 1-for-3 with a walk but was picked off for the second out of the eighth following his single. Brett Baty and Alvarez kept the inning afloat by drawing walks against Taylor Rogers (0-1) and Justin Topa, respectively, before Vientos’ bloop single to right scored Baty.
Vientos was thrown out at home by several feet for the final out of the sixth after running through third base coach Tim Leiper’s stop sign on Marcus Semien’s double.
Luke Weaver (2-0) threw the final 1 1/3 innings for the Mets. The right-hander, who also was the winning pitcher in New York’s previous victory on April 7, got Luke Keaschall to pop up with the bases loaded to end the top of the eighth. He allowed Brooks Lee’s two-out single in the ninth before striking out Byron Buxton to end the game.
Victor Caratini lofted a game-tying sacrifice fly in the fourth for the Twins, who have lost five of their past six. Buxton knotted the game again with a solo homer in the sixth.
Mets starter Clay Holmes gave up two runs on five hits and one walk while striking out three over seven innings. Twins starter Connor Prielipp allowed two runs on four hits and no walks while fanning six in his major league debut.
–Field Level Media
Tech
Google turns Chrome into an AI co-worker for the workplace
As part of its slate of Google Cloud Next announcements on Wednesday, the company shared plans to bring “auto browse” agentic capabilities to Chrome users in the enterprise, along with enhanced security measures.
With auto browse, Chrome users can take advantage of Gemini to understand the live context in their open browser tabs, and then use the AI to handle various tasks like booking travel, inputting data, scheduling meetings, and others related to web-based work.
Google suggests the tool could be used for things like inputting information in the company’s preferred CRM system based on content in a Google Doc, comparing vendor pricing across tabs, summarizing a candidate’s portfolio before an interview, pulling key data from a competitor’s product page, and more.
The company notes that its workflows will still require a “human in the loop,” meaning that the user will have to manually review and confirm the AI’s input before any final action takes place.
However, the idea is to help speed up these types of more tedious tasks to free up people to focus on what Google refers to as more “strategic work.”
This is the larger promise from AI advocates: that you’ll get your time back by using this new technology. But in practice, studies have shown that AI isn’t reducing work — it’s intensifying it. It remains to be seen how this will play out at the enterprise level as AI becomes a standard part of the workflow. Presumably, that could mean managers will expect that people can get more tasks done in less time.
Google says the new feature will initially be available to Workspace users in the U.S., as a part of Google’s push to infuse its AI into one of its most-used apps in the workplace, the web browser nearly everyone uses. It can be enabled via a policy, and Google states that an organization’s prompts won’t be used to train its AI models. (A disclosure that is increasingly necessary these days, given that Meta is even using its own employees’ keystrokes to train its AI.)
Like the consumer-facing version of the feature, Workspace users will be able to save their most common workflows for later use. These “Skills,” as they’re called, can be pulled up by either typing a forward slash (” / “) or by clicking the plus sign to access the needed Skill.
In addition to the infusion of AI into Chrome, Google is touting its ability to detect unsanctioned AI tools in the workplace via Chrome Enterprise Premium. Now, it’s expanding those capabilities to help IT teams look for compromised browser extensions or other AI services — specifically “anomalous agent activity.”
Google is correct to position this as a security feature, but it has another advantage, too. The tech giant is essentially leveraging corporate IT to shut down any other AI agents that could be taking root in the enterprise world organically. Years ago, this was how many web services established themselves in the workplace, amid an employee-driven “Enterprise 2.0” rush to adopt new technology like cloud storage, collaborative docs, or file sharing.
This new feature, which Google somewhat ominously dubs “Shadow IT risk detection,” will give IT teams visibility into the usage of both sanctioned and unsanctioned GenAI and SaaS sites across their organization.
IT teams will also receive a “Gemini Summary” of the Chrome Enterprise release notes and other AI-powered suggestions. This will surface critical changes, new policies, and upcoming deprecations, along with recommendations about things like configuring new settings or reviewing managed browsers.
The company also announced an expanded partnership with Okta to secure the agentic workplace with added features to reduce session hijacking and other protections. It’s also upgrading its security controls for extensions and introducing Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) integration to help organizations enforce consistent security policies.
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Fusion power may not be sci-fi. Just ask the people who sunk $5B into it.
Behind Mark Vientos' clutch hit, Mets edge Twins, snap 12-game skid
