Habs Roll Buffalo 6-2 in Game 3 to Take 2-1 Series Lead

Habs Game 3 win was a 6-2 Bell Centre rout. Four unanswered goals, Caufield finally scored, and the home crowd chanted Dobes at the rookie in net.

The Montreal Canadiens beat the Buffalo Sabres 6-2 in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Second Round on Sunday night at the Bell Centre. The Habs take a 2-1 series lead and host Game 4 on Tuesday. Alex Newhook scored twice for the second straight game. Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky, Zachary Bolduc, and Kirby Dach added the others. Lane Hutson and Jake Evans each had two assists. Jakub Dobeš made twenty-six saves for his sixth win of the postseason.

Buffalo opened the scoring fifty-three seconds into the game and then watched Montreal score four unanswered goals in under seventeen minutes of game time. The Sabres got a power-play goal from Rasmus Dahlin late in the second to make it 4-2 and never got closer. This was the first time this postseason the Canadiens have won two games in a row. They did it in front of a full Bell Centre that had been waiting since 2015 for a second-round home playoff game.

Kirk Muller carried the torch

Former Canadiens captain Kirk Muller carried the ceremonial torch into the building before puck drop. The torch ceremony — a nod to the Forum-era tradition of passing the literal torch from departing captains to the next generation — is the kind of pageantry the franchise reserves for the games it wants to feel historic. Sunday night was the first second-round home playoff game at a full Bell Centre in eleven years. The streets around Avenue des Canadiens filled hours before the game.

Then Tage Thompson scored fifty-three seconds in and the building went briefly silent. Dahlin’s point shot deflected off the end boards and onto Thompson’s stick, and the Sabres’ leading scorer ended a seven-game personal drought by quieting twenty-one thousand people in under a minute. After going minus-four with a costly turnover in Game 2, Thompson got the start he needed. It lasted exactly as long as it took Montreal to respond.

The four-goal answer

Alex Lyon kept Buffalo ahead through the first ten minutes with several point-blank saves on Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, and Joe Veleno. The Habs were pressing and Lyon was standing in the way. Then Newhook collected a rebound at 15:31 of the first and put it past Lyon to tie the game. That was the dam breaking.

Montreal scored three times in the second period. Slafkovsky scored on the power play. Caufield scored on the power play minutes later, finishing a play where Lane Hutson deked around a stick-less Jordan Greenway and dropped a pass to Caufield, who buried it into a gaping net. Bolduc added another. By the time Dahlin answered with a late power-play goal, the Habs were up 4-2 and the building was deafening. Four unanswered Montreal goals had turned a 1-0 deficit into a rout in under seventeen minutes of game time.

Kirby Dach cleaned up a loose puck off the end boards for the fifth goal with 11:14 remaining in the third. Newhook added the empty-netter after being hooked with a clear path to the open net with 4:46 left. Six goals, four of them in a seventeen-minute stretch spanning the first and second periods, against a team that won the Atlantic Division this season. The 6-2 final flattered Buffalo more than the game did.

Caufield finally scored

The single most important development for Montreal in Game 3 was not the score. It was Cole Caufield finally getting on the board. Caufield had gone five games without a point heading into Sunday. The top line of Suzuki, Slafkovsky, and Caufield had produced zero five-on-five points across the first two games of this series and the better part of the Tampa series before that. Through Game 2, the offence was being carried entirely by the Newhook-Evans-Demidov second line and the defensemen.

Caufield’s goal came on the power play, not at five-on-five, so the larger problem is not fully solved. But Caufield scored, Slafkovsky scored, and the top line got on the scoresheet for the first time in the series. A goal and an assist for Caufield. A power-play goal for Slafkovsky.

The line that scored thirty-plus regular-season goals from Caufield and produced the bulk of Montreal’s regular-season offence finally produced in a playoff game. The Habs need that to carry into Game 4, because the second line cannot out-score the opposition’s top six by itself for an entire series.

Hutson, the twenty-one-year-old Calder Trophy favourite, had two assists in the second period alone and was the engine of the four-goal run. His deke around Greenway to set up Caufield was the kind of individual defenseman skill that wins playoff series. He is the most important player on Montreal’s blue line and one of the most important players in the series, and on Sunday night he played like it.

The Bell Centre chanted his name

The Montreal crowd broke into chants of “Do-by! Do-by!” — one of several ovations the rookie goaltender received Sunday night. Dobeš, who outdueled Andrei Vasilevskiy in Tampa nine days earlier and then looked tired in the Game 1 loss in Buffalo, made twenty-six saves and twice denied Zach Benson during a third-period Sabres pushback. At one point he burst into laughter in his own crease as the building chanted his name.

“It warms your heart, and I’m really proud to be a Canadien and play for this franchise,” Dobeš said postgame. Then he said something that should be read carefully. “After the Tampa series, I couldn’t believe some of the things that happened in the city, but it’s so much fun.”

The things Dobeš could not believe that happened in the city after the Tampa series were not on the ice. They were the SPVM deploying riot units and chemical irritants against Habs fans celebrating on Crescent Street after the Game 7 win — the deployment covered in detail on Spark Solidarity.

The rookie goaltender, twenty-four years old and three weeks into being a folk hero in this city, watched the police beat the people chanting his name. The “things that happened in the city” is the gentlest possible way for a player to acknowledge what the people who love his team got for loving it.

Buffalo is unravelling on the road

The Sabres are now 2-3 at home this postseason and have lost the only road game they have played in this series. Their power play, which went 2-for-3 in Game 1 and 0-for-5 in Game 2, got a Dahlin goal in Game 3 but otherwise continues to be a liability rather than a weapon. Tage Thompson’s early goal was his first point in seven games and did nothing to change the result. The Atlantic Division champions are being out-skated, out-worked, and out-goaltended by a younger team that is supposed to be more tired.

The fatigue narrative that should have favoured Buffalo has fully inverted. The Habs played seven games against Tampa, four of them in overtime, and won a Game 7 on the road on nine shots. They had three days to recover before the Buffalo series opened. They lost Game 1 looking gassed and have won two straight since, including a six-goal outburst in Game 3. Whatever recovery the schedule was supposed to deny them, they have found it. Buffalo, the rested division champion, is the team that looks like it cannot keep up.

Game 4 is Tuesday and Buffalo needs it

Game 4 is Tuesday night at the Bell Centre. A Montreal win puts the Habs up 3-1 with two of the remaining three games at home and sends Buffalo back to their own building facing elimination. A Buffalo win evens the series at two and resets the home-ice math. For a Sabres team in its first second-round series since 2007, ending a fourteen-year playoff drought, Game 4 is the difference between a competitive series and a collapse.

The Habs have the momentum, the home crowd, the goaltender, and a top line that just woke up. Buffalo has Tage Thompson answering injury questions with “none of your business” and a power play that has been a coin flip all postseason. Montreal needs the Caufield-Slafkovsky line to keep producing and Dobeš to stay in the form he found Sunday. If both of those things hold on Tuesday, the Habs go to Buffalo with a chance to close the series out and reach the Eastern Conference Final for the first time since the Covid-altered 2021 run.

Go Habs go. Bell Centre on Tuesday.

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