Todd: Stanley Cup hopes of a nation rest on Canadiens’ shoulders
Buffalo and Canada share a lot of things. Niagara Falls. Lousy climate. The Bills, who almost certainly have more fans in Toronto than the Argos.
And a passion for hockey.
Unlike Tampa (where hockey has always seemed a sport grafted on by Gary Bettman) frigid Buffalo has legit hockey roots. If not quite an Original Six team, the Buffalo Sabres go back to the 1970-71 season, when the Canadiens won a miracle Cup and the French Connection line of Gilbert Perreault, René Robert and Richard Martin was born.
Now, the Sabres are about to meet the last Canadian team standing: your Montreal Canadiens, who somehow failed to record a shot on goal in the second period of Game 7 and still beat the Lightning to advance to the second round.
Outside of Montreal, it has been a difficult season for Canadian teams. The Vancouver Canucks are the league’s worst team. Calgary, Winnipeg and Toronto also failed to make the playoffs, and with boy genius John Chayka taking over, the Leafs are a good bet to spend another five years in the wilderness.
Three Canadian teams made the playoffs, but the Ottawa Senators were swept by Carolina, with captain Brady Tkachuk recording zero goals and zero assists, while Tim Stutzle had one measly assist. The talented Edmonton Oilers bowed to the Anaheim Ducks, wasting another season with Connor McDavid, with the best player in the league trying to play through a fractured ankle or foot and the front office still unable to solve the problems in goal and on defence.
That leaves the Canadiens and a Canadian Stanley Cup drought that is exactly as long as Montreal’s. The Canadiens may be the game’s greatest dynasty, but they haven’t won since 1993, nor has Canada.
In the background, the Buffalo-Montreal series that begins Wednesday still has the seething resentments of the tariff war waged by the gormless White House, along with the constant string of insults and American threats to annex all or part of this country.
If there is mutual respect between the Sabres and Canadiens and if Buffalo fans understand Canada better than most American markets, once the puck drops it will be Elbows Up for Canadians and a replay (in a very different setting) of the uncommonly hostile gold-medal game at the Milano-Cortina Olympics.
Add the idiotic vote that left Martin St. Louis off a list of finalists for the Jack Adams trophy, but somehow included Pittsburgh’s Dan Muse, and there is plenty of reason for players in the Canadiens’ room to be jacked for this second-round series — even if most will understand why veteran Lindy Ruff deserves the award after rescuing a Sabres team that spent a record 14 seasons out of the playoffs.
Can the Canadiens win it? They can — if Jakub Dobes plays the way he did through all seven games of the series against the Lightning. As the Hockey Night panellists pointed out, Dobes battled every minute of the series with no margin for error.
Dobes never had a wobble. It’s a lot to ask of a 24-year-old, fifth-round draft pick, but against Tampa, Dobes delivered a performance that was worthy of the much-ballyhooed Carey Price — or Andrei Vasilevskiy, one of Dobes’s boyhood heroes and the goalie he outplayed in this series by the slenderest of margins.
Even if Dobes is able to emulate his fellow Czech and former Sabre Dominik Hasek, the Canadiens need to figure out what happened in that second period of Game 7 in Tampa. Shots on goal don’t always reflect the run of play, but the Lightning’s 12-0 dominance in shots was entirely accurate.
After a pretty strong first period, the Canadiens were suddenly tentative and timid. A team that has been able to dial up goals on demand all season was unable to get so much as a sniff of the Tampa net. No matter what line combinations or defensive pairings the Canadiens threw out there, they struggled even to get the puck out of their own zone.
That isn’t going to cut it against the Sabres, who spent the season swatting away opponents with ease. Tampa is a very good team, but Buffalo (which hadn’t seen a playoff game since 2011) is marginally better.
If Buffalo has a weakness, you might think it’s in goal, where 33-year-old veteran journeyman Alex Lyon got most of the starts against Boston while Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen counted his consonants — but Lyon had a 1.14 goals-against and a .955 save percentage against Boston in the first round.
If the Cup is to come home to Canada and to Montreal, in other words, there is still a great deal of work to be done.
Heroes: Alex Newhook, Nick Suzuki, Lane Hutson, Kaiden Guhle, Alexandre Texier, Kirby Dach, Laura Stacey, Eliezer Adjibi, Marie-Éloïse Leclair, Duan Asemota, Audrey Leduc, Jeff Gorton, Kent Hughes, Martin St. Louis &&&& last but not least, Jakub Dobes.
Zeros: Nikita Kucherov, Corey Perry, Stewart Johnston, eight-team playoffs in the CFL, choosing your opponent in the PWHL, Keith Pelley, John Chayka, Jack Adams voters, LIV Golf, Bud Selig Jr., Claude Brochu &&&& last but not least, David Samson and Jeffrey Loria.
Now and forever.
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