Canadiens Outshot 39-13, Lose Game 3 in Overtime to Carolina

Canadiens were outshot 39-13 at home, scored twice anyway, and lost when Andrei Svechnikov beat Jakub Dobes 14:06 into overtime. Carolina leads 2-1.

Andrei Svechnikov scored at 14:06 of overtime in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Final on Monday night, beating Jakub Dobes through a Sebastian Aho screen to give the Carolina Hurricanes a 3-2 win at Bell Centre and a 2-1 series lead. Shayne Gostisbehere and Taylor Hall scored for Carolina in regulation. Mike Matheson and Lane Hutson scored for Montreal. Frederik Andersen made eleven saves. Dobes made thirty-five. The shot total was Carolina thirty-nine, Montreal thirteen.

It was the second straight overtime loss for the Canadiens at the hands of this Carolina team. It was also the second straight game in which Montreal was outshot by something close to three-to-one and stayed in striking distance anyway. That is the kind of competitive resilience that has carried this team through two seven-game series and into the conference final. It is not the kind of pattern that wins another round.

A game decided in two missed seconds

The most honest way to read this game is that Montreal had it. Thirty-five seconds into overtime, Nick Suzuki carried the puck in alone on Andersen, with the kind of look a captain dreams about in a playoff game his team is desperate to win. He shot it wide of the net. Twenty-five seconds after that, Mike Matheson hit the crossbar. Inside the first minute of overtime, the Canadiens generated two chances that, on a different night, end the game and tie the series.

What happened instead is that the game went on, and Carolina is the team that does not lose when the game goes on. Lane Hutson turned the puck over in the neutral zone, Seth Jarvis sent it up high to Svechnikov above the right circle, and Svechnikov fired a wrist shot through the legs of his own teammate Aho and past a screened Dobes. Matheson said the right thing afterward, because he said the true one. “We’re two shots away from being up 3-0 in the series,” he told reporters. They are not. They are down 2-1.

The shot disparity has stopped being noise

In Game 2 the Canadiens were outshot twenty-six to twelve. In Game 3 they were outshot thirty-nine to thirteen. Across two games on this side of the conference final they have been outshot by more than fifty shots. Some of that is the road-team-comes-home story, where Carolina cranks up its forecheck and the Habs spend the night defending.

Most of it is that Carolina is a structurally better five-on-five team than Buffalo or Tampa was, and the version of Montreal that has carried this run, the one that wins races to loose pucks and turns transition into clean breakaways, has not been able to find ice against this opponent.

The thirteen-shot total is the alarm. Dobes made thirty-five saves and gave up two, one of them on a power play and one of them in overtime after a turnover. He was the reason Montreal had a third period to play. The skaters in front of him generated a single goal in regulation, on a power play, with Cole Caufield setting up Hutson. The rest of the night they were chasing the game, and you cannot chase a team that has Andersen on a night where he barely has to work.

Carolina is now historically good in overtime

This is the part the Canadiens have to reckon with going into Game 4. Carolina is five-and-oh in overtime this postseason. According to the league’s own note, the Hurricanes are the fourth team in NHL history to win their first five overtime games in a single postseason. The other three are the 2003 Anaheim Mighty Ducks who reached the Final and the 2023 Florida Panthers and the 2011 San Jose Sharks who both made deep runs.

This is not a small sample anymore. This is a thing the Hurricanes do, and they have done it again at the worst possible moment for the Canadiens.

Brind’Amour, who lost a conference-final Game 1 as a player in 2006 and went on to lift the Cup, has built a team that wins the games where one mistake decides the night. The Canadiens, for all their playoff scar tissue from two seven-game wars, have not won an overtime game this round, and the games are tightening, not loosening. Montreal is good in tight games. Carolina is automatic in them. That difference is what 2-1 looks like.

What Game 4 has to look like

The Canadiens cannot win this series with thirteen shots a night. That is the simple version. The harder version is that the things that have made them dangerous all spring — speed through the neutral zone, transition off forecheck turnovers, the top line producing — were not in evidence on Monday. Nick Suzuki had the breakaway and missed; he was otherwise quiet. Juraj Slafkovsky did not score. Cole Caufield had a power-play assist and was a minus-one. The depth pieces who carried Game 1, Anderson and Demidov and Newhook, did not generate enough secondary offense to make up for it.

None of that is a panic point yet, because the series is 2-1, not 3-0, and the Habs are home again on Wednesday in a building that has been very loud for them all spring. But the gap between what Montreal needs to produce and what it has produced over the last two games is the actual story here. Carolina has played its game. Montreal has not yet played theirs.

Game 4 is the night that has to change, because the alternative is heading back to Raleigh down 3-1 against a team that has already shown it can choke them out for sixty minutes and finish them in the extra one.

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