TAMPA, Fla. — It would be easy to look at the Montreal Canadiens winning Game 7 on Sunday and eliminating the Tampa Bay Lightning in their own building as a coming-of-age moment.
They are, after all, the youngest team in the playoffs.
But a more accurate view would be that the Canadiens had already come of age, and it is that maturation process that allowed them to win Game 7.
Alex Newhook scored his first goal of the playoffs at 11:07 of the third period to snap a 1-1 tie and send the Canadiens to the second round against the Buffalo Sabres with a 2-1 victory over the Lightning. It capped a seven-game series that had one two-goal lead, had every game end with a one-goal margin, with four of them ending in overtime. It was a truly incredible series, and both teams were deserving, but only one team can win in the end.
It’s been a relatively short process for this young Canadiens group to win its first playoff series just five years after the previous incarnation of the Canadiens lost Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final in this very building in 2021.
“After the Cup final, there was a lot of tough times,” said Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki, who played in that final and scored his first goal of the playoffs in the first period. “A lot of guys left and we started this rebuild and slowly but surely we drafted some really good players and found an amazing coach. It’s definitely been probably faster than most people expected, but when you get a lot of great players together with a great system and great leadership, things can turn quickly.”
Suzuki and leading scorer Cole Caufield were young players on that veteran Canadiens team, but they are now veteran leaders of this group, with 12 players on the current roster younger than Caufield, who turned 25 on Jan. 2. That includes rookie starting goaltender Jakub Dobeš — Montreal’s best player, by far, in Game 7 with 28 saves — rookie star winger Ivan Demidov and Caufield’s linemate Juraj Slafkovský, the No. 1 pick in the 2022 NHL Draft who kick-started this rebuild.
But Slafkovský is a perfect example of the difference between age and experience. He just turned 22 on March 30, but has been in the NHL since 2022 and is completing his fourth season with the Canadiens.
“Young in age,” Brendan Gallagher, the Canadiens’ longest-tenured player who also took part in that 2021 Cup final, said Sunday morning when asked if he felt his team was still young.
They showed it in Game 7, even if that youth showed a bit in a difficult second period where the Canadiens failed to get a shot.
Except that’s where coach Martin St. Louis comes in, as he has throughout this journey, guiding this young group at the difficult moments.
“Obviously no one was happy with that second period, and he comes in, all fired up, getting us going for the third, really motivating the guys,” Suzuki said. “He’s our leader and everyone would do anything for him. He’s a hell of a coach, and he’s only been doing this for a short period of time, so I can imagine he’s only going to continue to get better. He loves what he does and we love playing for him.”
Dominic James scored for the Lightning, who dominated long stretches of Game 7 but couldn’t figure out Dobeš. And now the Lightning have lost in the first round four consecutive seasons and will head into the offseason with some serious soul-searching and perhaps a need to make some tangible roster changes to shake themselves out of this first-round rut.
Tampa head coach Jon Cooper said there wasn’t much to say post-game to a room full of players he felt deserved a better fate.
“It doesn’t matter what you say really. The words probably will mean something in a couple of days, but I think it’s just a lot of blank stares from everybody wondering how that one got away from us,” Cooper said.
For Cooper, it reminded him all too much of what happened in the Olympic gold medal game in Milan where, as Team Canada head coach, his team outshot and outchanced Team USA but ran into a brick wall named Connor Hellebuyck. This time, the wall was Dobeš.
“As soon as that last buzzer went, that’s the feeling I had, I’ve seen this movie before,” Cooper said. “All you can ask of your team, whether it was the Olympic tournament or a best-of-seven playoff, is to get better as you go. And I thought we got better as we went. I thought tonight we played our best game of the series. Sometimes you win the game and not the score. But it’s Game 7, there’s no moral victory in that.”
A second period to remember … or to forget
Trailing after 20 minutes, the Lightning outshot the Canadiens 12-0 in the second period and finally broke through with James’ tying goal. The Canadiens did not register a shot on goal despite getting two power plays in the period, but for the vast majority of time at five-on-five, they seemed simply content to hand the puck back to the Lightning and let them attack.
Now, the Lightning deserve credit for that as well. They were suffocating in the neutral zone and pressured Canadiens puck carriers all over the ice into mistakes.
But considering how the middle frame went, the Canadiens were lucky to have a chance to win the game in the third. And that was thanks largely to …
Jakub Dobeš was on fire
Many of the Canadiens’ young players had moments in this game where their youth showed.
Not the case with Dobeš.
He made 11 saves in that second period and turned aside a number of quality Lightning chances in the first as well, with two of his best coming off Gage Goncalves one-timers from the slot area. He made another off Goncalves on a one-timer from the slot at 5:10 of the third period.
“Many times in the season, the guys helped me out and bailed me out. I tried to do the same, vice versa, sometimes they don’t play good, sometimes I don’t play good. They’ve always got my back and I’ve always got theirs. That’s our mentality.”
Dobeš entered the game with a .916 save percentage in the series and provided some of its finest moments. But that second-period performance might have been his best.
All a team can ask of its goaltender is to give them a chance to win. Dobeš did that, and more.
Stunned Lightning
As the media entered the home dressing room after Game 7, about half the Lightning players were still sitting at their stalls, stunned look on their faces.
“There’s obviously some disbelief in our room that we can play like that and not walk away with anything,” Cooper said.
Said Tampa star Brandon Hagel: “You can’t say much about the game tonight, you’re going to win 99 percent of those games.”
The Lightning outshot the Canadiens 29-9 and owned a lot of the puck, but the scoreboard said a different story. It was gut-wrenching for a team that was sure this season they would get back to their deep playoff run ways.
They felt they left it all out there Sunday night.
“I thought that was probably our best game of the series,” said center Anthony Cirelli. “Their goalie played well. We had a lot of looks at it. Disappointing.”
Hagel pointed to one particularly disappointing aspect of this series.
“At the end of the day, you lose three games at home, you’re probably not going to win the series,” he said.
Cooper said it was still too fresh to dissect everything but in the moment, he doubts he will regret how his team played.
“We couldn’t have played it any better,” he said. “And it still wasn’t good enough. At some point, too, you have to tip your cap to Marty St. Louis and the Montreal Canadiens and Jakub Dobeš. They had a plan and stuck to it. They got the lead and protected it. And when they broke down, the goalie was there for them.”
Noah Dobson returns for Canadiens
Noah Dobson suffered what appeared to be a left-hand injury on April 11, with some fears he might have broken a bone.
Three weeks and a day after the injury, Dobson was in uniform for Game 7. And he made an impact.
“We had a terrible second period, but I thought we regrouped well in the third,” Dobson said. “It’s not pretty, but throughout this series as a whole you could say we deserved to win. We had lots of chances last game. It was tight, and we found a way. Dobes was incredible. Gutsy.”
He was not sheltered by coach Martin St. Louis, was able to shoot the puck and made some important defensive plays. The Canadiens might have lost a bit of physicality with Arber Xhekaj giving up his spot to Dobson, but they added a ton of poise and puck-moving.
One of Dobson’s biggest plays came on the shift after the James goal tied it. Lined up for an offensive zone faceoff, Dobson’s shot from the point went wide to the outside and rimmed around the boards to Brandon Hagel, creating a two-on-one break for the Lightning with Dobson defending. Just as Hagel was getting ready to pass it across, Dobson slid on the ice and poked the puck away with his stick.
With just over five minutes left in regulation, Dobson blocked a Hagel shot in the Canadiens’ slot and slowly made his way to the bench, in clear discomfort. There were replays suggesting he might have taken the shot off the injured hand.
“It was in the proximity, yeah,” he said with a big smile. “But honestly, I feel good. I’m just happy to be back with the guys. We’ll enjoy this one, and get ready for the next one.”
He is able to talk about the next one because he helped the Canadiens reach in the second round for the first time in five years.
