Habs Even Series 1-1 With 5-1 Rout of Buffalo in Game 2

Habs Game 2 win evens the series 1-1 in Buffalo. Newhook scored twice. Matheson, Carrier, and Suzuki added the rest. Game 3 is Sunday at the Bell Centre.

The Montreal Canadiens beat the Buffalo Sabres 5-1 in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Second Round on Friday night at KeyBank Center. Alex Newhook scored twice. Mike Matheson, Alexandre Carrier, and Nick Suzuki — empty-netter — added the others. The Habs scored two goals in the first five minutes of the game and never trailed. The series is tied 1-1 and heads to the Bell Centre on Sunday night for Game 3.

Jakub Dobeš stopped 27 of 28 in a starter line that looked nothing like the goalie who let in four on sixteen shots Wednesday night. Alex Lyon allowed four goals on twenty-seven shots for Buffalo and surrendered the net before the third period was over. The Sabres’ power play, which had gone 2-for-3 in Game 1 and looked like the unit that woke up at exactly the wrong moment for Montreal, went 0-for-5 on Friday and dropped to 3-for-32 on the postseason.

Newhook gave them the lineup-read boost

The St. John’s, Newfoundland-and-Labrador native scored ninety-six seconds into the game by redirecting a Kaiden Guhle pass that threaded through Alex Tuch’s legs to the front of the net. The shot was Montreal’s first of the game.

The 1-0 lead lasted two minutes and fifty-one seconds, until Mike Matheson floated a snap shot from the left point over Lyon’s right shoulder on a Phillip Danault face-off win. Five minutes into Game 2, the Habs were up 2-0 in a building that watched them get punched in the mouth on Wednesday.

Newhook’s second goal came four minutes and forty-seven seconds into the second period — four seconds after a Buffalo power play expired without a shot on goal. Jake Evans broke up the right wing, sent it across to Newhook driving the back door, and Newhook tapped it past Lyon for the 3-0 lead.

The line of Newhook, Evans, and Ivan Demidov is the new second unit Martin St. Louis put together in the late stages of the Tampa series. Across the back half of that first-round series and the opening two games of this one, they have been the most consistent line Montreal has rolled.

“We have the ability to produce throughout our lineup,” Newhook said postgame. “When you get the lineup read, you just try to supply some energy there early and just try and carry that.”

The “lineup read” — the moment a player learns he is dressing for the game — is the kind of detail beat reporters do not press on and players do not bring up unless they want to. Newhook brought it up because the second-line role he has now is a role he had to wait for. He gave the team his answer to the lineup-read question on the game’s first shot.

Buffalo’s power play was supposed to be the difference

Game 1 was won on two power-play goals from a unit that had been dead for two months. Game 2 reset the average. Buffalo went 0-for-5 with the extra skater on Friday night. They have now converted three of thirty-two man-advantage opportunities across the playoffs.

The Game 1 outlier read as the outlier it always was. Two months of zero production does not flip on permanently because of one good night against a tired opponent.

The structural problem this exposes for Buffalo is not the power play itself. It is what the rest of the offence has to do when the power play is not bailing them out.

Tage Thompson, who scored forty-four goals in the regular season, was on the ice for three Montreal goals on Friday and on the wrong end of the sequence that produced Carrier’s third-period dagger. With Buffalo pressing for a comeback in the third, Thompson tried to keep a puck in at the right point. He lost his balance, spun down to the ice, and watched Carrier scoop up the loose puck and beat Lyon for the 4-1 score.

“Trying to chase the game, try and force plays that aren’t there, and just wasn’t executing,” Thompson said postgame. “I think everything I touched turned into disaster tonight. So, tough one. Got to be better. It’s as simple as just flush that one, move on.”

When a reporter followed up asking whether he was playing through an injury, Thompson responded: “I don’t think that’s any of your business.” The single most consequential offensive player on the team that won the Atlantic Division this season is now answering injury questions with the bluntest possible refusal. File that one for the next two games.

The top line is still missing

The Habs won 5-1 and got nothing from Cole Caufield or Juraj Slafkovsky at five-on-five. Caufield extended his point drought to five games. Slafkovsky has one assist in his last eight outings.

Nick Suzuki, the captain, has six points through five road playoff games — joining Scott Gomez’s 2010 streak as the only Canadiens skater in the past twenty-five years to open a postseason with a five-game road point streak — but his linemates have produced almost nothing in the same window.

Through one hundred and twenty minutes of this series, Suzuki and Slafkovsky and Caufield have combined for zero five-on-five points. The top line that powered Montreal’s regular season is being held under by Buffalo’s defensive structure, and the offence has been produced by the supporting cast Martin St. Louis has been assembling around them. Newhook, Evans, Demidov on the second line. Matheson and Carrier from the back end. The empty-netter from Suzuki to close the scoring on Friday was the captain’s first five-on-five contribution since Game 6 against Tampa.

“He brings so much speed, it’s really hard to defend,” Slafkovsky said about Newhook after the game. “He just used his wheels, got behind the D, and Jake made a great pass.”

That is a winger on a struggling top line crediting the player on the surging second line for the team’s win. It is also a winger on a team’s first line whose own production has been one assist across his last eight playoff games. The dynamic the Habs need to flip before Game 3 is the dynamic where the second line out-produces the first line. They need the first line back.

Dobeš adjusted

Twenty-seven saves on twenty-eight shots is the line Dobeš needed. The Benson goal that broke the shutout came on a sequence where Montreal’s defensive structure collapsed in the slot. The other twenty-seven Buffalo shots that came at him got stopped. Dobeš said postgame that the three-day turnaround between the Tampa Game 7 and the Buffalo Game 1 had not given the Habs time to “settle everything together and reset our minds,” and that Game 2 was the team adjusting to a faster opponent than the one they had just spent two weeks against.

“You play Game 7, I feel like we didn’t have much chance to prepare,” he said. “I feel like we adjusted today really well. And yeah, I feel we catch a breath in the series. And I feel that we are ready to play our hockey and compete against the team for the rest of the series.”

This is the rookie who outdueled a Hall of Famer in Tampa last weekend, talking to reporters in Buffalo about how his team needed three days to figure out how to play a different opponent. He has been processing this experience in real time on national television for two and a half weeks. He has not given a bad answer yet.

Dahlin called it unacceptable

“Awful game. Not acceptable,” Rasmus Dahlin told reporters postgame. “They wanted to compete the first ten minutes, and then that’s what kind of set the tone for the whole game. It’s hard to come back, especially in the playoffs, when an opponent is up two. So, can’t happen.” The Sabres captain came off the right-leg injury scare from Game 1 to play full minutes Friday, did not put up a point, and was on the ice for the Carrier turnover-goal sequence that put the game out of reach.

The line “they wanted to compete the first ten minutes” is the line every captain gives after a bad home loss, and it is also the diagnosis the press will run with for the next forty-eight hours.

The Sabres got out-competed in the first ten minutes of Game 2 by a team that had three days of accumulated fatigue from the Tampa series and a defensive group that should have been gassed. The fatigue Dobeš talked about postgame did not show up. The Habs came out of the gate harder than the Sabres did. That is the kind of game a young team that has won the Atlantic Division needs to win at home in the playoffs, and Buffalo did not win it.

The Habs go home

Game 3 is Sunday night at 7 p.m. ET at the Bell Centre. It is the Canadiens’ first home game since flying to Tampa for Game 7 the previous Sunday. The team stayed in Florida for two days before flying directly to Buffalo on Tuesday morning. Friday’s win in Game 2 means they get to come home to Montreal with the series tied, the second-line Newhook-Evans-Demidov unit clicking, and the first line still searching for the chemistry that produced thirty-plus regular-season goals from Caufield and forty-plus regular-season points from Slafkovsky.

Sunday will be the first second-round home game at a full Bell Centre since 2015. The pre-game atmosphere on Avenue des Canadiens will be the version of itself that the entire city has been waiting for since the Habs cleared Tampa.

The team that walks out of the tunnel for warmups Sunday night will be a different team than the one that flew to Buffalo on Tuesday. The Caufield-Slafkovsky line gets a real chance to break out in front of their own crowd. The supporting cast gets the home-ice match-up advantage. Buffalo gets to play in a building that has historically been one of the loudest playoff atmospheres in the league.

Go Habs go. Bell Centre on Sunday.

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