Dobeš, Newhook, and Two Bad Bounces Doom Another Lightning Postseason
- Mike Smith
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
By Mike Smith| Thunderstruck Sports
Imagine having 29 shots on net and holding your opponent to only nine in a decisive Game 7 in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, only to lose the game and have your season ended. That's exactly what happened to the Tampa Bay Lightning Sunday night when Jakub Dobes and the Montreal Canadiens eliminated them, 2-1, at Benchmark International Arena.
Montreal won game 7 with nine shots on goal. Nine shots. The NHL record for fewest shots on goal in a playoff win was 10, set by the 1990 New Jersey Devils, the 1974 Chicago Blackhawks, and the 2024 Edmonton Oilers. Montreal eclipsed that with nine.
Montreal had nine shots on goal. Montreal had nine shots on goal and won Game 7. Montreal had nine shots on goal and won Game 7 in Tampa.
The Canadiens move on to face the Buffalo Sabres in the second round of the playoffs. The Lightning start another offseason far too soon for their liking, and have a great deal to contemplate before training camp opens in mid-September.
Lightning Left Stunned After Impressive Performance
The Lightning held every advantage on the scoresheet Sunday night, except one stat: the final score.
Tampa Bay held Montreal without a shot for 26:55, including a second-period shutout, and still lost the game.
“There’s obviously some disbelief in our room that we can play like that and not walk away with anything,” Lightning Head Coach Jon Cooper said.
“You sit back here, and obviously, you're upset. It sucks, but like, there's not much more you can do, "Lightning forward Brandon Hagel said. "You give up zero shots in the second period, three shots in the third period, and you lose a hockey game."
Two goals on weird bounces went Montreal's way, and sent Montreal packing up and heading to Buffalo on Wednesday night.
Nick Suzuki scored at the 18:39 mark of the first period when his tip-in of a Kaiden Ghule shot went off the leg of Bolts defenseman JJ Moser. The tip was going wide right of the net, but the puck found twine instead.
The series-winning goal came at the 11:07 mark of the third period when Alex Newhook found the puck bouncing off the glass to knock it in behind Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy.
The initial shot attempt by Lane Hutson went to Vasilevskiy's right side and was batted by Vasilevskiy to the glass behind him. Newhook then found the puck and swiped at it mid-air with a backhand to score before Vasilevskiy could fully get in position to protect the post.
The goal stunned the Lightning bench, and they never recovered.
"The Hockey Gods have been in my corner many, many times," Cooper said. "And tonight they were in the other corner."
Dobeš Frustrates Lightning with Stellar Performance
Andrei Vasilevsky started Game 7 with 126 career playoff games. Montreal goalie Jakub Dobeš had nine.
Dobeš came out in Game 7, the most important game of his young career, and absolutely refused to let the Lightning find the back of the net.
Dominic James scored the lone goal of the night for Tampa Bay at the 13:27 mark of the second period on the power play to tie the game at 1-1.
And that was it. Dobeš stopped the other 28 shots.
Dobeš beat one of his heroes, Vasilevskiy, in the process. A feat that surprised even him.
"I couldn't believe it, I still cannot believe it. I don't wanna get emotional, but I was dreaming about this since I don't even know," Dobeš said.
"I'm really proud of myself, but I gotta stay humble. I was the luckier guy and beat him (Vasilevskiy) in a best of seven."
While Montreal couldn't get a shot off in the second period, Dobeš made 11 saves. He also stopped nine shots in the first period, with two of his best coming off one-timers by Gage Goncalves.
Goncalves was the victim of another Dobeš robbery in the third period when his one-timer was turned away 5:10 into the period to keep the score even.
“Inside, I'm really happy, but I think it's going to kick in later. Dream big, I guess,” said the quiet 24-year-old from Czechia. “I've always been a dreamer, always wanted these moments, and this is definitely one of the coolest games and situations I've ever been in.”
“We couldn’t have played it any better,” Cooper said. “And it still wasn’t good enough. At some point, too, you have to tip your cap to Marty St. Louis and the Montreal Canadiens and Jakub Dobeš. They had a plan and stuck to it. They got the lead and protected it. And when they broke down, the goalie was there for them.”
“I thought that was probably our best game of the series,” said center Anthony Cirelli. “Their goalie played well. We had a lot of looks at it. Disappointing.”
“He's (Dobeš) grown a lot as a goalie. He's super confident in himself, which you love to see,” Suzuki said. “He's a gamer. He's been doing that since he got to our team, and we're going to need him to continue playing as we go along here.”
“Tonight, what did we have, nine shots, 10 shots?," Montreal coach Martin St. Louis said. "I felt like tonight they (Tampa Bay) deserved better. I felt like Game 6, we probably deserved better, and Dobeš kind of stole the game. Similar to the way (Vasilievskiy) stole the game in Game 6, in my mind. You need a little bit of everything, and that's what we got this series."
Dobeš remained humble when talking to the media after the game.
"Many times in a season the guys bail me out and help me out, and I try to do the same,” he said. “I was just trying to keep the guys in it, and I was waiting for them to get going, and that is exactly what happened.”
Bolts Left to Wonder 'What Happened?'
Tampa Bay enters the offseason with a first-round exit for the fourth consecutive year since making the Stanley Cup Finals in 2022. The team spent a great deal of time in their own thoughts after Game 7, and even Jon Cooper talked of trying to find the right thing to say to his disappointed squad.
“It doesn’t matter what you say, really," Cooper said. "The words probably will mean something in a couple of days, but I think it’s just a lot of blank stares from everybody wondering how that one got away from us.”
Hagel, who had an amazing start to the series with six goals in four games, was kept in check most of the final three games of the series, recording only one assist.
"You don't get any younger, that's for sure," Hagel said. "Listen, I've got one goal on my mind and one goal on my mind every single year, and I couldn't care less if I, I don't know, I just want to win."
Nikita Kucherov was also held at bay by Montreal, scoring only once in the seven-game series. Kucherov has been held pointless in all six Game 7's he's played since 2015.
Brayden Point was held to one goal in the series, as was 22-goal-scoring defenseman Darren Raddysh.
Another startling fact was that the Lightning lost three of the four games in the series on their home ice.
"You can't say much about the game tonight. You're gonna win 99% of those games," Hagel lamented. "But at the end of the day, you lose three games at home, you're probably not going to win the series."
On the positive side, Jake Guentzel had a good series overall with two goals and six assists.
The young guns showed what the future holds going forward. 23-year-old Dominic James had two goals and an assist in the last three games of the series. JJ Moser had the game-winning overtime goal in Game 2, and Goncalves had the Game 6 overtime game-winner.
In a series befitting of an Eastern Conference Championship level, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman got what he was looking for with the current playoff setup, where the second-seeded team in the tough Atlantic Division (Tampa Bay) paired up with the third-seeded team (Montreal) in the first round.
The winner of each game in the series only won by a single goal, and four of the seven games went to overtime.
But this was the first round, and the Lightning ended up on the short end of the stick.
In the end, Cooper lamented the fate the Lightning endured at the hands of the Montreal Canadiens.
"This team was different. It was different. They deserve better than what has happened to them," Cooper said. "It's too bad because of how hard they've worked and committed and just did everything we asked, and then to go out. This was that team. They just went out there wearing their heart on their sleeve, and they gave everything they possibly could, and we just came up short."
The Lightning played a fantastic Game 7, yet lost in a fashion befitting a team that struggled the last three months of the season.
The Lightning played catch-up most of the time against Montreal, trailing in every game at some point except Game 6, which they won 1-0.
The last time the Lightning held a lead after the first period was in a 6-2 win in Vancouver on March 19th. After posting a 19-1-1 streak before the Olympic break, the Bolts finished the season 16-16-2, including the playoffs.
When Cooper was asked how the ouster from the Stanley Cup Playoffs felt compared to the Canadian loss to the United States (where he led Team Canada) in the Gold Medal game, the Lightning coach drew a breath and looked off into the distance.
“As soon as that last buzzer went, that’s the feeling I had, I’ve seen this movie before,” Cooper said. “All you can ask of your team, whether it was the Olympic tournament or a best-of-seven playoff, is to get better as you go. And I thought we got better as we went. I thought tonight we played our best game of the series. Sometimes you win the game and not the score. But it’s Game 7, there’s no moral victory in that.”
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