Canadiens Drop Game 2 in Overtime as Carolina’s Ghosts Wait

Canadiens managed just 12 shots, rode Josh Anderson to overtime, and lost — Nikolaj Ehlers won it in the extra frame to even the East Final 1-1.

Three nights after Montreal turned the Eastern Conference Final opener into a first-period demolition, the series found its level. Nikolaj Ehlers got loose up the middle of the ice 3:29 into overtime, took a feed from Mark Jankowski, and beat Jakub Dobes stick-side to give the Carolina Hurricanes a 3-2 win and even the best-of-seven at a game apiece. It was Ehlers’s second goal of the night, and it was the difference between a series and a crisis.

For the Canadiens, this was the loss that stings most: the kind you earn a point from and still walk away from knowing you were outplayed. Montreal managed twelve shots on goal all night. Carolina had twenty-six and out-hit them by thirty. The Habs hung around on the back of one player and very nearly stole a game they had no business being in, and that they came as close as overtime is its own kind of warning about how thin the margin was.

The Carolina that didn’t show up in Game 1

The Hurricanes that lost the opener 6-2 were a team caught flat, gashed for clean breakaways and transition chances by a Montreal side that had been sitting and waiting. The Hurricanes that showed up for Game 2 were the team that won eight straight playoff games to get here. The forecheck was back. The gaps were tight. The quick-strike chances Montreal kept burying on Thursday simply were not there, and the twelve-shot total tells the story of a Canadiens team that spent the night trying to escape its own end.

Eric Robinson opened the scoring for Carolina, and for long stretches it looked like the Hurricanes would win comfortably enough to forget the opener entirely. They led 1-0 after the first and 2-1 after the second, controlled the territory, and kept Dobes busier than the final shot count suggests. The only thing missing was the cushion — and against this Montreal team, no lead built on twelve-shot suppression is ever quite safe.

Josh Anderson keeps the Habs breathing

If Montreal had a reason to believe, it wore number 17. Josh Anderson scored both Canadiens goals, the second coming at 12:51 of the third period to tie the game 2-2 and force overtime out of almost nothing. On a night when the Habs could barely sustain possession, Anderson turned two of their handful of real chances into goals, which is the kind of individual game that wins a team a point it did not collectively deserve.

That is also the worry. Nick Suzuki was held without a point and finished even on the night. Juraj Slafkovsky, the first star of Game 1, was a minus-one and barely a factor. Cole Caufield was quiet. The Canadiens got two goals from a depth forechecker and nothing from the engine that drove them through Tampa and Buffalo, and they still nearly won — which is either a testament to their resilience or a reminder that they cannot keep asking Anderson to be the whole offense.

Ehlers was the difference, twice

Carolina signed Nikolaj Ehlers in the offseason for nights exactly like this one, and he delivered the two biggest goals of his Hurricanes career within a few hours. The first was the highlight: he carried the puck from the red line late in the second, turned to his backhand and back to his forehand to slip between two Montreal defenders, and wrapped a shot around Lane Hutson and through the five-hole for the 2-1 lead. It was the kind of individual skill play Carolina has historically lacked at exactly these moments.

The second was the winner. A retreating Jalen Chatfield bounced the puck off the boards in his own end to Jankowski, who redirected it to Ehlers entering the zone at full speed, and Ehlers did the rest. “He’s a special talent, and it was on full display tonight,” Rod Brind’Amour said afterward, calling him “a guy that can win a game for you.” On a team built on structure and suppression, Ehlers is the one player who can manufacture a goal out of nothing, and in a series this tight that is the element that decides games.

The overtime team that can’t lose in overtime

Here is the pattern Montreal now has to reckon with. Carolina is 4-0 in overtime this postseason and has won six straight overtime games dating back further than that. More specifically, the Hurricanes have now won Game 2 in overtime in all three of their series this spring, with Ehlers becoming the sixth different Hurricane to score a game-winner during the run. The franchise that cannot win a conference final has somehow become close to automatic in the one situation where a single mistake ends the night.

For a Canadiens team that has won two seven-game series and is comfortable in chaos, that is a genuinely uncomfortable trend. Montreal does not lose its nerve in tight games; it has spent the entire playoffs in them. But Carolina’s overtime record this spring is not luck anymore, and the Habs will have to find a way to put one of these games away in regulation rather than trusting that the extra frame breaks their way.

What the split actually means

The number that loomed over Game 2 was not 1-17. It was 0-2. Only one team in NHL history has ever recovered from losing the first two games of an Eastern Conference Final, and that was in 1945, which means a Game 2 loss would have buried Carolina under nearly eighty years of precedent. The Hurricanes did not just avoid that hole; they did it by looking like the dominant team they were billed as, which is the version of Carolina the Canadiens did not want to wake up.

So the series resets, even at one, and shifts to Montreal for Game 3 on Monday with home ice now on the Canadiens’ side. Montreal got the split it needed on the road and proved in Game 1 it can blow this Carolina team off the ice. Carolina answered by proving Game 1 was the aberration, not the rule. The ghost that the opener seemed to summon has gone quiet for now — but a franchise with this team’s history knows better than anyone that quiet is not the same as gone.

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