Jakub Dobes<\/a> did that from start to finish, and not just in Game 7.<\/p>\nThe 24-year-old rookie goaltender stopped 181 of the 196 shots he faced in this series, and he conjured miracle after miracle in the final game, outduelling the greatest goaltender of a generation in Andrei Vasilevskiy.<\/p>\n
\u201cDobes kind of stole the game,\u201d said St. Louis.<\/p>\n
If he could take back the words, \u201ckind of,\u201d we\u2019re sure he would.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s super confident in himself, which you love to see,\u201d said Suzuki of Dobes. \u201cHe puts the work in every single day away from the rink in preparing himself to go into games in a proper mindset, which I learned a lot of his routine last night, which was pretty cool. \u2026 He\u2019s a gamer. He\u2019s been doing that since he got to our team, and we\u2019re going to need him to continue playing well as we go along here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before we get to Buffalo and to the challenge that awaits the Canadiens in Round 2 versus the resurgent Sabres, some review is in order of the closest playoff series in recent memory.<\/p>\n
It was the third series in NHL history to have all seven games decided by a single goal. There was just one two-goal lead the whole time, and it lasted less than six minutes. Each punch was countered, each goal replied to until the final one stood, and the shots were just about even until the Lightning decided to deny the Canadiens any for 26:57 of Sunday\u2019s game.<\/p>\n
The Canadiens couldn\u2019t find Vasilevskiy\u2019s padding, let alone his net, between Suzuki\u2019s goal at the end of the first and the wrister he hit Vasilevskiy with 5:36 into the third period.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was their best stretch of the series,\u201d said Lane Hutson. \u201cIt showed they\u2019ve been here before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Sunday\u2019s loss made it a fourth consecutive first-round exit, the Lightning were perennial winners of games like these.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They set the foundation of their standard on their run to the 2015 Cup Final. By 2020, they turned it into the golden one of the league with their first of back-to-back Cup wins. And then they fell just two wins short of winning a third straight in 2022.<\/p>\n
At the start of that year, the Canadiens began their rebuild.<\/p>\n
A month later, St. Louis, a former Lightning legend, took over the bench in Montreal and tried to emulate everything he\u2019d learned from watching this Tampa team.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow long has (Jon Cooper) been here (coaching the Lightning)? It\u2019s been 13 years,\u201d he said. \u201cYou look at the steps they took, and it\u2019s something that we\u2019ve tried to replicate. It\u2019s an organization and team that set the standard, and I watched the Lightning a lot before I was coach, and with good reason. Not just because I played for the Lightning, but also because of how they play. <\/p>\n
“When I took the job as coach, I wanted to have a team that could play in possession, that could defend, that had a good power play. I tried to absorb a lot of the things the Lightning did and bring them here to Montreal, and it was the biggest challenge to go beat that team in the first round. We were two teams with the same attitude, but they had more experience in the playoffs. We stayed on task to get through the highs and lows, and we learned a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
Especially about what it takes to not only win, but to beat a champion.<\/p>\n
St. Louis talked about timely power-play goals in Game 1, depth scoring in Game 3, a winning goal in Game 5 produced on a good line change as an example of the details required, and miraculous goaltending in Game 7.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou need a little bit of everything,\u201d he said, \u201cand I feel that\u2019s what we got in this series.\u201d<\/p>\n
What the Canadiens needed two-thirds of the way through Game 7 was a dose of perspective.<\/p>\n
Suzuki said St. Louis delivered it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he\u2019s one of the best coaches in the whole world,\u201d said Suzuki. \u201cIt feels like he says the right thing in every single situation, knows how to get the best out of his guys. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
After his press conference, on his way out of Benchmark International Arena, St. Louis told us he jolted the Canadiens; made them realize that, despite their freeze-up in the second, they had a chance to go win the third and the series; that they had given up a huge advantage on the shot clock but only a power-play goal to Dominic James; that the score was still tied 1-1 and a lead was available to them if they could just flip momentum.<\/p>\n
Newhook, who beat the Lightning in 2022 with the Colorado Avalanche to become the Cup winner on the Canadiens, snatched it back from behind Vasilevskiy\u2019s net with 8:53 to go.<\/p>\n
And then the Canadiens held the lead and prevailed with the lowest shot total ever recorded in an NHL playoff win.<\/p>\n
Was there some luck in it? Of course.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t advance without it.<\/p>\n
But the Canadiens fought for this. From Suzuki, who scored 101 points in the regular season before finally breaking through Anthony Cirelli\u2019s dogged coverage to record his first at five-on-five of the series Sunday, to Noah Dobson, who missed the first six games with an injury to his left hand before taking 25 shifts in Game 7.<\/p>\n
“We couldn’t have played it any better, and it still wasn’t good enough,\u201d said Cooper. \u201cSo at some point, too, you have to tip your cap to Marty St. Louis and the Montreal Canadiens<\/a> and Jakub Dobes. They made a plan and stuck to it. They got the lead, protected it, and when they broke down, their goalie was there for them. \u00a0And that takes something, too, because it’s not like they just won one game like this. They won three prior games to get to this game. And it comes down to one game. And that’s why sports is an incredible life here.”<\/p>\nIt gave us a sensational series unlike any we\u2019ve covered.<\/p>\n
The coin just came up Canadiens in the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 In the end, the coin came up Canadiens. It flipped seven times in this series.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194292],"tags":[49,48,2338],"class_list":["post-646859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-montreal","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-montreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}