Habs Lose Game 4 3-2 Despite Dominating, Series Tied 2-2

Habs Game 4 loss was a 3-2 heartbreaker the Habs deserved to win. They outshot Buffalo 30-22, lost on a stanchion goal, and watched Luukkonen steal it.

The Buffalo Sabres beat the Montreal Canadiens 3-2 in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Second Round on Tuesday night at the Bell Centre. The series is tied 2-2 and heads back to Buffalo for Game 5 on Thursday. Zach Benson scored the game-winner on the power play with 15:19 left in the third. Matthias Samuelsson and Tage Thompson also scored for Buffalo. Alex Newhook and Cole Caufield scored for Montreal. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen made twenty-eight saves on thirty shots.

Montreal outshot Buffalo 30-22. They out-blocked them 14-6. They out-hit them 27-25. They won the third period in shots 15-5 and lost the game. The Habs went one-for-seven on the power play. Buffalo went two-for-four. The story of Game 4 is the same story that has run through this entire Montreal playoff run, just inverted: a team can dominate the puck for fifty of sixty minutes and still lose if the goaltending and the special teams break the other way.

The team that won on nine shots lost on thirty

Nine days ago in Tampa, the Canadiens won a Game 7 with nine shots on goal. They got out-played for entire periods and won anyway, because Jakub Dobeš stopped everything and the bounces went their way. Game 4 against Buffalo was the photographic negative of that night. Montreal generated thirty shots, controlled the territorial play for most of the game, dominated the third period, and lost 3-2.

This is the cruelty of playoff hockey distilled into a single game. The metrics that are supposed to predict winning — shot share, possession, scoring chances, zone time — all pointed to Montreal. The scoreboard pointed to Buffalo. The difference was a goaltender playing the game of his life and a power play that converted at exactly the rate Montreal’s did not. Hockey does not award the game to the team that deserved it. It awards the game to the team that scored more goals, and on Tuesday that was the team that got dominated.

The Habs have now alternated wins and losses for the entire postseason. Win Game 7 in Tampa. Lose Game 1 in Buffalo. Win Game 2. Win Game 3. The Game 3 win broke the alternating pattern. Game 4 reset it. A team that cannot string together consecutive results against a division champion is a team that is going to play a long series, and this one is now a best-of-three with Buffalo holding home ice for two of the three.

The stanchion goal

Tage Thompson had been the least productive star in this series. Minus-five through three games. A broken stick against the post in frustration in Game 2. By his own admission, the puck was bouncing every time he touched it. In Game 4 he tied the game on a dump-in from center ice that hit the stanchion by the Zamboni bay, caromed off Dobeš’s knee, and went into the net.

It was one of the most ridiculous goals of the series. Thompson was not shooting. He was rimming the puck in to keep Dobeš in his net during a line change. The thick steel stanchions in the corner by the Zamboni bay produced a bounce that no goaltender prepares for, because the puck does not behave that way off the thinner stanchions everywhere else in the building.

Dobeš, anticipating a pass to a winger, had drifted to the wrong side. The puck found the one trajectory that beat him. The least-productive star in the series tied the game on the single luckiest goal of it.

That is the kind of bounce that decides playoff series and means nothing about which team is better. It went in. The game was tied. And the Bell Centre, which had been the loudest building in the league for two and a half periods, went briefly silent in the way only a fluke goal can produce. There is no defensive coverage for a puck that ricochets off a steel post and a goalie’s leg. There is only the scoreboard, and the scoreboard said 2-2.

Luukkonen made the saves Dobeš made in Tampa

Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen started Game 4 because Alex Lyon had given up four goals in Game 2 and the series was on the line. Luukkonen had been pulled fourteen seconds into the third period of his last start, a Game 2 loss to Boston in the first round. He had not played meaningful minutes since. Lindy Ruff went back to him with the series tied and Luukkonen delivered the performance of his career.

He gave up two goals on eight shots in the first period and looked uncomfortable. Then he stopped twenty-two consecutive shots. The two stops on Cole Caufield in the second period — one on a one-timer that he caught with the elbow sliding across, one on a longer-developing chance where he did the splits to get across — were the saves that kept Buffalo in the game when Montreal was pressing for a two-goal lead. Both were the kind of point-blank chances Caufield has buried hundreds of times. Luukkonen stopped both.

Twenty-eight saves on thirty shots. Twelve saves in the third period under what was a sustained Montreal siege. The goaltender Montreal was supposed to feast on after Lyon faltered stood in front of everything for sixty minutes and did not blink. It is the exact role Dobeš played in Tampa, transposed onto the other team. The series is now a goaltending series, and on Tuesday Buffalo had the better goaltender.

The power play decided it

Montreal went one-for-seven on the power play. Buffalo went two-for-four. That is the entire game in one line of special-teams math. The Habs got seven cracks at a Buffalo penalty kill that has been the Sabres’ calling card all series, and converted once — Caufield’s go-ahead goal with thirteen seconds left in the first period, off a Thompson cross-check on Kaiden Guhle, with Lane Hutson and Juraj Slafkovsky assisting.

Buffalo, the team whose power play went 0-for-22 to end the regular season and entered this series as the analytical soft spot, scored twice on four chances. The Samuelsson opener came on a defenseman jumping into the play. The Benson game-winner came on the power play with 15:19 left in the third, after Jake Evans took a holding penalty on Peyton Krebs in a tied game. Buffalo’s power play, dormant for two months, has now decided two of the four games in this series.

The discipline was catastrophic on both sides. Buffalo took eight penalties, including two double-minors. Montreal took enough to give Buffalo the four power plays they needed. The Carrier high-stick on Rasmus Dahlin that drew blood produced a four-minute Buffalo power play. The penalty parade turned a fast, clean hockey game into a stop-start special-teams contest, and the special-teams contest broke Buffalo’s way. A team that wins the special-teams battle two-to-one usually wins the game, even when it gets out-shot by eight.

Benson scored on his birthday

Zach Benson turned twenty-one on Tuesday and scored the game-winning playoff goal in front of both sets of grandparents. He is only the second Sabre ever to score a playoff goal on his birthday. The first was Peter McNab in 1975 — also against Montreal. Benson’s family runs a three-generation carnival business; his great-grandfather Bingo operated a traveling exotic zoo in 1948, performing with lions, bears, and crocodiles before the family moved into carnival rides in the 1960s.

“It was a great, gutsy playoff win,” Benson told the broadcast postgame. “There was a lot of penalties in the game, and I thought our special teams won us that game.” Benson is twenty-one years old, has four goals this postseason, and is the kind of young, fearless forward the Sabres’ rebuild was built around. The Doan connection is the one most Montreal fans should be tracking — Josh Doan, son of Shane Doan, has seven assists in four games and has been the connective tissue on every Buffalo scoring play, including this one, without scoring a goal himself.

The Sabres are now 4-1 on the road this postseason. They lost two of three at home and have won every road game except one. For a team that ended a fourteen-year playoff drought this spring, the road resilience is the trait that turns a feel-good story into a genuine contender. Buffalo did on Tuesday exactly what they did to close out Boston in the first round — won a tough road game when they had to.

Newhook keeps scoring and the top line keeps trying

Alex Newhook scored for the third straight game, tying the score 1-1 at 10:08 of the first on a puck-battle goal off a Jake Evans setup. It was his sixth of the playoffs, and it extended the run that has made him the hottest player in this series. The Newhook-Evans-Demidov line that Martin St. Louis assembled late in the Tampa series continues to be Montreal’s most reliable unit, and Newhook continues to be the player carrying the offence when the top line cannot.

The top line at least got on the board. Caufield scored the power-play go-ahead goal in the first period — his second goal in two games after a five-game drought — and is shooting with renewed confidence. The two chances Luukkonen stopped were the kind of looks Caufield was missing earlier in the series.

He is generating them again, which matters more than the conversion rate over a long series. Suzuki and Slafkovsky still have not produced at five-on-five at the rate Montreal needs, but the line is creating chances now in a way it was not in Games 1 and 2.

Ivan Demidov is still looking for his first postseason goal. The Bell Centre has been waiting for it. He had two good chances Tuesday and Luukkonen turned both aside. The rookie is generating, the building is ready, and the goal feels like it is coming. It did not come Tuesday, on a night when almost nothing Montreal generated turned into anything on the scoreboard.

Game 5 is Thursday and the series is even

Game 5 is Thursday night at 7 p.m. ET at KeyBank Center in Buffalo. The series is tied 2-2. If it goes the distance, Game 6 is Saturday at the Bell Centre and Game 7 is Monday in Buffalo. The series looks now exactly like it looked before it started: two good young teams, neither pulling away, with special teams and goaltending deciding the margins.

Montreal will not lose much sleep over the process of Game 4. They outplayed the Atlantic Division champions in their own building and lost to a stanchion bounce and a goaltender’s career night. The result is what stings; the performance is the one they want to repeat.

The question is whether they can get the same effort on the road in Game 5 and whether Dobeš can match Luukkonen the way he matched Vasilevskiy in Tampa. If both of those things hold, the Habs are still the better team in this series. They just need the scoreboard to agree with them for once.

Go Habs go. Buffalo on Thursday.

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