Habs Beat Buffalo 6-3 in Game 5, One Win From the East Final

Habs Game 5 win was a 6-3 road statement. Buffalo’s stars handed it over with the puck, Demidov finally scored, and Montreal leads the series 3-2.

The Montreal Canadiens beat the Buffalo Sabres 6-3 in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Second Round on Thursday night at KeyBank Center. The Habs lead the series 3-2 and can close it out at the Bell Centre on Saturday. Nick Suzuki had a goal and two assists. Cole Caufield, Alex Tessier, Josh Anderson, Jake Evans, and Ivan Demidov also scored. Jakub Dobeš made thirty-three saves on thirty-six shots.

Buffalo outshot Montreal 36-26. They outshot the Habs 20-3 in the third period. They lost the game by three goals. This has been the structure of the entire series and the entire Montreal playoff run: the opponent generates the volume, Montreal generates the goals, and the goaltender holds the difference. On Thursday the goaltender was Dobeš, who is now 5-0 after a loss in these playoffs and has not lost consecutive games all postseason.

The most chaotic ten minutes of the series

The first period produced five goals in ten minutes and fifteen seconds, including four goals in a two-minute, forty-four-second span — the fastest four goals scored in this year’s playoffs. Jason Zucker deflected one past Dobeš two minutes in. Caufield answered at 6:31, snapping a wrist shot past Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen for the top line’s first five-on-five goal of the series, with Suzuki and Slafkovsky assisting.

Then it accelerated. Josh Doan put Buffalo back ahead at 7:45. Alex Tessier answered nine seconds later at 7:54. Konsta Helenius, in his second career playoff game and one day after his twentieth birthday, wristed his first career playoff goal past Dobeš at 10:15 to make it 3-2 Buffalo. Dobeš had given up three goals on four shots. The building was deafening and the game looked like it was getting away from Montreal early, the way Game 1 in Buffalo did.

It was not getting away. After Helenius scored, the game went scoreless for twenty-eight minutes. Both goaltenders settled in. Nobody took a penalty for the rest of the first and most of the second. The chaos of the opening ten minutes gave way to the kind of tight, low-event hockey that has defined this series everywhere except the scoreboard, and in that stretch Montreal slowly took the game back.

The save that turned it

The game changed on a single save. Midway through the second period, with Buffalo leading 3-2 and pressing, Tage Thompson got a clean look in front of the net. Dobeš stopped him. It was the kind of save that does not show up as a goal prevented on any stat sheet but functions as a hinge for an entire game. Dobeš, who had looked shaky on three early goals, made the stop that told his bench he was good to go.

Martin St. Louis had a decision to make after the first period. Three goals on four shots is the line that gets a goaltender pulled, and the broadcast openly wondered whether Trevor Latoski, the goaltending coach, would recommend going to the backup. St. Louis stayed with the rookie. It is the same decision he made in the Tampa series, the same trust he has shown Dobeš all spring, and it paid off the same way. Dobeš stopped everything for the rest of the night.

Thirty-three saves on thirty-six shots. Twenty saves in the third period under a sustained Buffalo siege that produced a 20-3 shot advantage and zero goals. The goaltender who gave up three on four in the first period closed the game by stopping the next thirty-two of thirty-three. The number that matters most is the one that has held all postseason: Dobeš is 5-0 after a loss, and he does not lose consecutive games.

Buffalo’s stars handed it over

The two goals that broke this game open both came directly off penalties taken by Buffalo’s best players. Josh Anderson tied it 3-3 at 8:01 of the second on a Lane Hutson setup. Then Jake Evans poked home his first goal of the playoffs at 16:15, off an Ivan Demidov feed, to give Montreal a 4-3 lead — the first lead Buffalo had surrendered after holding three of them.

What happened next is the story of the series in one sequence. Tage Thompson cross-checked Jake Evans in a way the broadcast called the dumbest penalty of the playoffs. Suzuki buried the power-play goal ten seconds later, off a Slafkovsky setup, to make it 5-3. Then early in the third, Rasmus Dahlin cross-checked Ivan Demidov, and Demidov scored on the resulting power play to make it 6-3. The two penalties Buffalo’s captain and best forward took turned directly into the two goals that ended the game.

Lindy Ruff has been talking about discipline since Game 1 of this series. His stars keep ignoring him. Thompson, who scored forty-four goals in the regular season and is the single most important offensive player on the roster, has now spent critical minutes of multiple games in the penalty box and watched Montreal score on the power plays his penalties created. A team cannot beat a disciplined opponent’s power play — Montreal went two-for-two on Thursday — when its best players keep handing that power play the puck.

Demidov finally scored

Ivan Demidov scored his first career playoff goal in Game 5, and the way it happened was close to poetic. Rasmus Dahlin cross-checked him early in the third period. Demidov scored on the power play that the cross-check created, a wrist shot from the top of the circle that beat Luukkonen clean. The nineteen-year-old who got hit scored the goal that punished the hit.

Demidov is the Calder Trophy runner-up — Matthew Schaefer won it unanimously, but Demidov finished second — and he had been the most-watched scoreless player in this series. He generated chances in every game and finished none of them. The Bell Centre had been waiting for the goal. Buffalo’s building got it instead, on the road, in a series-defining Game 5, off a power play his opponent handed him. He had two points on the night and looked, finally, like the player Montreal traded futures to acquire.

The postgame footage of Demidov getting emotional describing the goal, and of teammates who had spent three games tapping him on the helmet in encouragement, is the kind of thing that tells you what a dressing room actually is. Caufield, who had nothing to do with the goal, jumped in the air on the bench when it went in. That reaction is not media-trained. It is a young team that genuinely likes each other, and that is a harder thing to build than a power play.

The top line is fully back

Cole Caufield’s first-period goal was the top line’s first five-on-five goal of the entire series. Suzuki assisted on it and added the power-play dagger, finishing with a goal and two assists. Juraj Slafkovsky did not score but had three assists, running his quiet, everywhere-at-once game that has made him one of the most important Canadiens in the series despite the lack of goals next to his name.

The line that was held to zero five-on-five points through the first two games of this series produced the opening goal and the back-breaking power-play goal in the most important game of it. Suzuki has been the constant all spring — the captain who opened the playoffs with a five-game road point streak and has not stopped producing.

Caufield has gone from a five-game drought in the Tampa series to scoring in three of the last four games. The top line being functional in May is the difference between a Habs team that can win a Conference Final and one that bows out in the second round.

Lane Hutson had two more assists and now has ten in fourteen playoff games. He is a twenty-two-year-old defenseman running the Montreal power play and quarterbacking the offence in his first full playoff run, and the Norris Trophy conversation for him is no longer premature. The engine of this Montreal team is a defenseman who cannot legally rent a car in some American states, and he has been the best version of himself in the biggest games.

Game 6 is Saturday and the Bell Centre is ready

Game 6 is Saturday night at 8 p.m. ET at the Bell Centre. Montreal is one win from the Eastern Conference Final, their first appearance in a conference final since the Covid-altered 2021 run to the Stanley Cup Final. Buffalo, trailing 3-2, must win Saturday in Montreal to force a Game 7 back in Buffalo on Monday, and the Sabres have not won a playoff series since 2007.

The alternating pattern that has defined Montreal’s entire postseason — win, lose, win, win, lose, win — would have the Habs closing it out Saturday. The pattern is not a strategy, but it points at the truth underneath it: this Montreal team responds to every setback with a win and has not lost two in a row since the playoffs began. They lost Game 4 on a stanchion bounce and a goaltender’s career night. They answered with a 6-3 road statement in Game 5. The team that bends but does not break gets to try to end it at home.

Go Habs go. Bell Centre on Saturday.

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