Habs Beat Buffalo 3-2 in Game 7 OT, Newhook Does It Again

Habs Game 7 win came in overtime on Newhook’s second clincher of the playoffs. Dobeš made 37 saves, and Montreal is off to the Eastern Conference Final.

The Montreal Canadiens beat the Buffalo Sabres 3-2 in overtime in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Second Round on Monday night at KeyBank Center. Alex Newhook scored the winner at 11:22 of overtime to send Montreal to the Eastern Conference Final. Phillip Danault and Zachary Bolduc scored in regulation. Jakub Dobeš made thirty-seven saves, including a huge stop on Tage Thompson in overtime. The Canadiens win the series 4-3 and advance to the semifinal round for the first time since 2021.

It ended the way the entire Montreal playoff run has been ending: with the second line making the play, the rookie goaltender holding the line, and Alex Newhook scoring the goal that wins a Game 7. The Habs led 2-0, watched Buffalo tie it, and won it in extra time on the same line and the same player who closed out the Tampa series fifteen days earlier. Montreal opens the Conference Final against the well-rested Carolina Hurricanes on Thursday in Carolina.

Newhook did it again

Alex Newhook scored the overtime winner on a play that started with Buffalo’s two best players. Tage Thompson and Rasmus Dahlin misplayed the puck at Montreal’s blue line. Alexandre Carrier collected it, drove up the right wing, and sent a cross-ice pass that hit Newhook in stride entering the Buffalo zone. Newhook drove to the top of the left circle, snapped a wrist shot through a Jake Evans screen, and beat Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen’s glove inside the far post.

It was Newhook’s second Game 7 series-clinching goal of these playoffs. He scored the decisive goal in Game 7 against Tampa Bay, breaking a 1-1 tie 11:07 into the third period to send Montreal past the Lightning. Now, 11:22 into overtime against Buffalo, he did it again. He is the second player in NHL history to score multiple Game 7 series-clinching goals in a single postseason, joining Nathan Horton with the 2011 Boston Bruins.

“It’s a crazy feeling. A lot of emotion, obviously,” Newhook said. “It was a war all series long.” Newhook was a player Montreal acquired in a trade, a former first-round pick whose career had not delivered on the promise until this spring. He told reporters earlier in the series that he had been trying to prove to himself and to the team that he could be part of winning in Montreal. He has now proven it twice, in the two biggest moments a hockey season produces.

The second line was the series

The line of Newhook, Jake Evans, and Ivan Demidov was the best unit on the ice in this series, and it was the only Montreal line generating offence in the final two periods of Game 7. Martin St. Louis assembled it late in the Tampa series as a way to spread scoring through the lineup when the top line could not produce. It became the engine of Montreal’s second round.

Across this series, that line produced Newhook’s goals in three straight games, Evans’s first playoff goal in twenty postseason appearances, and Demidov’s first career playoff goals. It was Evans flashing in front of Luukkonen that screened the overtime winner. It was Carrier, the defenseman who has quietly been one of Montreal’s two best blueliners all playoffs, who made the pass. The goal that sent Montreal to the Conference Final was scored by the depth pieces St. Louis spent the spring assembling, not the stars the franchise was built around.

That is the version of this team that wins in the playoffs. The top line of Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, and Juraj Slafkovsky was held under for stretches of this series, and Montreal won anyway because the offence came from everywhere. A team that needs its first line to carry it loses a seven-game series to an Atlantic Division champion. A team whose second line scores the Game 7 overtime winner advances.

Dobeš does not lose twice in a row

Jakub Dobeš got pulled in Game 6 after giving up six goals in the worst loss of Montreal’s postseason. In Game 7 he made thirty-seven saves, including the save of the series — a stop on Tage Thompson in overtime that kept Montreal alive long enough for Newhook to win it. The pattern that has defined his rookie playoff run held one more time, in the only game where it absolutely had to: Dobeš is 5-0 after a loss in these playoffs, and he did not lose two in a row all season.

He is now the third goaltender in Canadiens history to win two Game 7s in a single postseason, and the sixth rookie in NHL history to do it. The twenty-four-year-old who outdueled Andrei Vasilevskiy in the first round and got pulled in a Game 6 blowout in the second answered both with series-clinching wins. The goaltending question that opened up after Game 6 closed in Game 7 the way it has closed all spring.

The KeyBank Center crowd chanted Dobeš’s name all night, mockingly, the way a hostile building taunts a goaltender it wants to rattle. He loved it. “Their fans like to chant my name. I like that, too,” he said afterward. “Thanks for that. Actually, that was giving me fire because I like when you’re the villain.”

This is the same goaltender who said after the Tampa series that he could not believe some of the things that happened in the city of Montreal — the police deployment that beat his own fans in the street. He understands the difference between a crowd that wants to hurt you and a crowd that loves you, and he chose to feed off the first one.

The series was a war and Montreal earned it

This was a seven-game series in which the home team kept losing, the leads kept evaporating, and the goaltending kept deciding everything. Buffalo led 2-0 in Game 1 and won it. Montreal won three of the next four. Buffalo forced a Game 7 with an 8-3 home blowout of Montreal. Then Montreal won the deciding game on the road, in overtime, the same way it won the first round. The team that does not lose two in a row did not lose two in a row.

Phillip Danault scored his first goal of the 2026 playoffs to open the scoring at 4:30 of the first, off a Kaiden Guhle centering pass that deflected in off his skate. Zachary Bolduc added a power-play goal to make it 2-0. Then Jordan Greenway and Rasmus Dahlin scored to force overtime, Dahlin tying it 6:27 into the third. The game went to extra time the way half this series went to the wire, and Montreal had the better chances in the overtime before Newhook ended it.

Buffalo’s season ends one win short of a Conference Final, and it should not be read as a failure. The Sabres won their first Atlantic Division title, ended an NHL-record fourteen-season playoff drought, and won their first playoff series since 2007. They went 39-9-5 over their final fifty-three games to climb from last in the East to second. Lindy Ruff told his players he would not let one game define the season they had. He is right not to. Buffalo dropped to 1-7 all-time in Game 7s, but the franchise that walks into next season is a genuine contender.

Carolina is next and Carolina is rested

Montreal advances to the Eastern Conference Final for the first time since the Covid-altered 2021 run, when the Canadiens reached the Stanley Cup Final and lost in five games to Tampa Bay. The franchise has been almost entirely rebuilt since. This is a younger, faster, deeper team, anchored by a twenty-two-year-old Calder-contending defenseman in Lane Hutson, a rookie goaltender who wins Game 7s, and a captain in Suzuki who has produced all spring.

The Carolina Hurricanes are waiting, and they are well-rested. Carolina has been off since closing out its own second-round series, breaking down film on both Montreal and Buffalo while the Habs and Sabres beat each other up for seven games. The Canadiens have played fourteen playoff games, including two seven-game series and three Game 7s’ worth of pressure, and will open the Conference Final on the road in Carolina on Thursday against a team that has had a week to recover.

Rest matters in May. So does the kind of hardening that comes from winning two Game 7s on the road against a Hall of Fame goaltender and an Atlantic Division champion. Montreal is the team nobody wanted to draw and nobody expected to be here, built on a second line that scores the biggest goals and a rookie goaltender who refuses to lose twice in a row. They have earned the right to find out how far that takes them.

Go Habs go. Carolina on Thursday.

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