Habs Game 1 loss to Buffalo 4-2 was the post-Tampa hangover. Doan and Greenway scored; the Sabres’ dead power play scored twice and that was the series.
The Buffalo Sabres beat the Montreal Canadiens 4-2 in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Second Round on Wednesday night at KeyBank Center. Josh Doan, Ryan McLeod, Bowen Byram, and Jordan Greenway scored for Buffalo. Nick Suzuki and Kirby Dach scored for Montreal. Alex Lyon stopped 26 of 28. Jakub Dobeš stopped only 12 of 16 in a starter line that read like a goal-tending hangover from the Tampa series finale.
The Sabres go up 1-0 in the series and head into Game 2 on Friday night with the same lineup and the same goaltender. The Canadiens go back to the visitors’ dressing room with three days of accumulated fatigue, a power-play unit that gave up two against, and a goalie who let in four goals after allowing two combined across Games 6 and 7 in Tampa.
The power play that was supposed to be dead
Buffalo’s power play went 1-for-24 against Boston in the first round. It went 0-for-22 in the last seven games of the regular season. Across 46 consecutive man-advantage opportunities spread over a month and a half, the Sabres scored one goal with the extra skater. They opened Game 1 against Montreal by going 2-for-3.
The Ryan McLeod power-play goal at 13:26 of the first was a Zach Benson cross-crease pass that hit a wide-open right side. The Bowen Byram goal in the second was a snap shot from between the circles on the next power play after Suzuki took a tripping penalty. Two consecutive man-advantage opportunities, two goals, and the series math shifted twelve minutes into Game 1.
“Maybe keep asking, if we’re gonna keep scoring now,” McLeod told the postgame scrum when reporters asked about the unit. The line is funny. The structural point is that Buffalo entered this series with a power play that had cratered for the better part of two months and rediscovered it in the exact moment the Habs needed Buffalo’s special teams to stay dormant.
The Sabres’ Atlantic Division championship was built on Tage Thompson’s forty-four-goal season and Rasmus Dahlin’s defensive minutes. The power play was the part of the roster the analytical models had circled as the soft spot. It hardened on Wednesday.
Byram tied a 38-year-old franchise record
Bowen Byram’s second-period power-play goal was his fourth of these playoffs, tying the Sabres’ franchise record for goals by a defenseman in a single playoff year. The record holders before Wednesday: Mike Ramsey in 1988, Jason Woolley in 1999, and Alexei Zhitnik also in 1999. Byram is twenty-four years old, a Stanley Cup winner with Colorado in 2022, and he is currently the second-most-productive defenseman in this year’s playoffs behind only Cale Makar.
“He really relishes the opportunity to be playing for something big,” Lindy Ruff said postgame. “He’s trying to make every play count. He’s been there before, and he’s got that taste, and you can see the hunger he has.” Ruff is on his second stint as Sabres head coach. He coached the team during the Ramsey-era record season in 1988. He is now coaching a defenseman who has just tied his own franchise’s thirty-eight-year-old benchmark on his watch.
The Habs do not have a defenseman in Byram’s tier right now. Lane Hutson is the player they would pair against him in any analytical comparison, and Hutson had a brutal first sequence on the Doan goal that opened the scoring. He fell down trying to make a play on the puck in the neutral zone.
Benson and Doan went in on a 2-on-1. The leg-kick fake from Benson fooled Dobeš into reading shot, the pass slid behind the skates of a sliding Noah Dobson, and Doan tapped it in on the back door. Four minutes and thirty-one seconds into Game 1, the Habs were down 1-0 and Hutson was on the wrong end of a highlight reel.
Dobeš looked like Dobeš from the wrong game
Twelve saves. Four goals. The line on the scoresheet for Jakub Dobeš in Game 1 is the line of a goaltender his team faced in some other building three nights ago. The Habs gave up sixteen shots and the Sabres scored on a quarter of them. That is not a sustainable opponent shooting percentage and it is also not a goaltender who looked like the rookie who outdueled Andrei Vasilevskiy in back-to-back Game 6 and 7 starts.
The Benson fakeout on the opening goal was a read-and-react failure on a play Dobeš has stopped fifty times in his career. The McLeod power-play tap-in was a defensive structure failure that left the right side of the crease unguarded. The Byram snap shot from between the circles caught Dobeš positioned for a different release point. The Greenway goal that closed it out was the kind of accumulated-pressure puck that finds the back of the net when a goalie is grinding against a tired defensive group.
None of this is a referendum on Dobeš. It is the cost the Habs are paying for the way the Tampa series ended. Seven games. Four overtimes. A road Game 7 win on nine shots. Three nights of recovery for a rookie goaltender between his biggest professional start and the second-round opener against a team that finished the regular season with the second-most points in the Eastern Conference. The schedule did not do him any favours. The performance reflected the schedule.
Dach gave them the highlight reel anyway
Kirby Dach’s goal at 16:31 of the second period was the kind of finish that makes the postgame highlight reel even when your team loses. Driving up the right wing on a 2-on-1, Dach’s centering pass to Zachary Bolduc was broken up by the stick of Alex Lyon. The puck caromed back to a falling Dach. Off-balance, half-watching the play break down in front of him, he backhanded the rebound over Lyon’s left arm and into the net.
“Tried to make a play on a 2-on-1 and just tried to whack it, honestly,” Dach told reporters after the game. “Tried to whack it across the crease to, I think Boldy was over there. Didn’t really plan on that going over the goalie’s shoulder.”
The shorthand version of what happened on the ice is that the Habs lost Game 1 4-2 and Dach scored a beautiful goal anyway. The full version is that this Canadiens team has the offensive skill to manufacture goals against a hot Buffalo team in a Buffalo building when it has the legs to set up the chances.
The legs were not there Wednesday. Nick Suzuki extended his road point streak to start the playoffs to five games, joining Scott Gomez’s 2010 streak of six as the only Canadiens skater in the past twenty-five years to do it. Suzuki has two goals and four assists across that stretch. He is doing his job. The supporting cast is going to need to find another gear before Game 2 on Friday or the series math is going to keep moving the wrong direction.
Buffalo is what Tampa wanted to be
The Sabres are playing in their first second-round series since 2007. The fourteen-year playoff drought they ended this season is the longest active drought in the NHL on the morning of Game 1, and most of the current roster was in high school or middle school when Buffalo last won a playoff series. Tage Thompson, the franchise’s leading scorer and a Hart Trophy candidate, was not yet ten years old.
What the Sabres have done in the past five months is the version of a rebuild that the Lightning’s roster construction was supposed to produce and stopped producing four years ago. Buffalo went 39-9-5 over its final fifty-three games to finish second in the Eastern Conference. The Sabres swept their final ten regular-season games. They beat Boston in six in the first round in a series the analytical models had Boston winning. They are young, healthy, rested, and home for the next two games of this series.
The Habs are the opposing version of the same story. Younger by an average year on the ice. Less rested. Their best skater is still Suzuki and their best player tonight is still Dobeš on most nights. Their defensive core is built around a twenty-one-year-old Calder favourite in Hutson. The team that the cap-era hockey establishment kept telling everyone to emulate just lost in seven to one of the teams emulating it. The next team emulating it is now waiting two games up on the team that beat the emulators.
Dahlin limped, then walked it off
Rasmus Dahlin blocked a Jake Evans shot with under three minutes left in the third and limped off favouring his right leg. He briefly went up the tunnel before returning to the bench. He did not see any further ice time. Lindy Ruff said postgame that he saw Dahlin walking down the hallway without an obvious issue and that the captain should be fine for Game 2.
Dahlin is the structural axis of the Sabres’ defensive group. His ice time will be the single most consequential variable in this series outside the goaltending matchup. If the Habs are going to come back in this series, they need Dahlin to either miss time or play through an injury that visibly compromises his skating. Neither outcome appeared imminent on Wednesday night, which is its own story for the Habs. Even the moment of the game when their luck might have turned came with a clean walk-off recovery for the player it would have benefited them to lose.
St. Louis kept his cards close
Martin St. Louis was asked after the game what he thought went wrong. “I have ideas,” he said, “but I’m not going to put my stamp on those ideas right now. Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.” That is the head coach who returned to Tampa as a visitor last week and eliminated the franchise that retired his number. He is allowed to be cagey with the press in a Buffalo press room on a Wednesday night four days later.
What he said before the press answer is the version that matters. He said his team had significantly more open ice against Buffalo than they had against Tampa’s tight-checking system in the first round. He said the team needed to learn how to take advantage of that open ice. Then he stopped before getting specific. The Habs have Friday night in Buffalo for Game 2 and Sunday afternoon in Montreal for Game 3 to figure out what he saw on Wednesday. He has the rewatched film. The press will get the answer after the series ends.
Game 2 is Friday and Game 2 is everything
Game 2 is Friday at 7 p.m. ET at KeyBank Center. Dropping the first two on the road against an Atlantic Division champion is the version of this series Canadian fans do not want to think about, and the version Buffalo’s home crowd will spend the next forty-eight hours hoping for. The Sabres got one. They want two before the series even reaches Montreal.
The Habs need three things from Game 2. They need Dobeš back to the Game 6 and 7 version of himself. They need the supporting cast around Suzuki to produce at the rate the captain has been producing. And they need to keep Buffalo’s power play off the ice, which means staying disciplined against a team whose man-advantage just woke up after a forty-six-opportunity hibernation. None of those three things are easy. All of them are within the team that just beat Vasilevskiy on his own ice.
Go Habs go. Friday in Buffalo.