RALEIGH, N.C. — A caution to Montreal Canadiens fans: If you didn’t like what you saw from your team in Game 7 against the Buffalo Sabres, you might want to avert your eyes from this showdown with the Carolina Hurricanes.
Because much of this Eastern Conference final will be played in the Canadiens’ end, with the Hurricanes applying wave after wave of pressure that will force Jakub Dobes to conjure more than a few miracles and force the players in front of the Montreal goaltender to withstand a physical beating.
“They’re a really good team,” said Josh Anderson of the broom-wielding Hurricanes, who swept the Ottawa Senators and Philadelphia Flyers to get to this stage.
“They’re fast, they’re quick,” continued Anderson, “and they’re going to be kind of like Buffalo.”
Kind of, but not quite exactly.
While the Hurricanes can knock you on your heels like the Sabres, they do it differently. They dump more pucks out of their zone and into the offensive one — even if they did do that less this season than they did over the last few, ranking middle of the pack instead of head of class in both categories — and they employ a fraction of the risk Buffalo plays with in possession of the puck while taking on much more of it than Buffalo does without it. Both teams will give you rush chances, but Buffalo will feed them to you by trying (and failing) to pass right through you and the Hurricanes will force you to earn them by getting out of your end as fast as possible and by any means necessary to beat their first wave of pressure.
That wave is ferocious, and it comes from the Hurricanes forechecking with three forwards while both defencemen pinch down the walls. They are masters at forcing turnovers that way, and they’re just as good at creating them off the chaos that ensues from shooting pucks from everywhere, and they will succeed at doing it for periods at a time, no matter how you try to counter them.
But if Dobes can keep making the saves, and the Canadiens can survive that pressure and continue to be as opportunistic on the chances they’ll get from their opponents’ over-aggression — like the one Alex Newhook capitalized on in overtime to win Game 7 in Buffalo — Montreal fans might just love the results.
Kind of like they did in the regular season, when Dobes and the Canadiens won all three of their games against the Hurricanes by a combined score of 15-8 despite being out-chanced 116-66.
If this Montreal-Carolina series plays out similarly, the only people who will hate watching it more than Canadiens fans will be the analytics community.
But the Canadiens didn’t just luck out against the Hurricanes in the regular season, and luck won’t be the main factor in beating them in the playoffs.
If they can do it, their strategies and lineup composition will be bigger factors — just like they were in the regular season.
The Canadiens are strong in possession, but also fast and skilled enough to capitalize on chances they’ll get from their willingness to risk temporarily losing possession. They also have game-breaking talent throughout their lineup, which is what you need to score on the rush chances you’re sure to get against the Hurricanes just by punting pucks past that first wave of pressure and retrieving them in the neutral zone.
It won’t be what the Canadiens seek to do every time they get the puck in their own zone. Ideally, they’ll be able to execute quickly by either having their defencemen skate with the puck or pass it efficiently through the barriers the Hurricanes post.
But if the Canadiens insist on reversing pucks in their own end just to maintain possession — and they often do that to a fault — they’re welcoming the mauling the Hurricanes intend on giving them.
“I think that’s definitely a good point,” Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki said on Wednesday. “I think we’re a possession team first and foremost. We like to have the puck, to play with control. And, I think, for them, they bring a ton of pressure every single place on the ice, and you have to be ready to make plays at any point. You can’t just try to make plays for the sake of making plays. If you’ve got to put it out in the neutral zone and live to fight another day, I think that’s fine. I think we can do that. It’s definitely going to be needed in this series, and you’ve just got to be smart with how you manage the puck everywhere.”
The Florida Panthers understood that better than any other playoff opponent the Hurricanes have had in recent playoffs.
They won eight of nine third-round games against the Hurricanes over their 2023 and 2025 runs to the Stanley Cup final — out-scoring them 31-16, despite earning only 45 per cent of the expected goals — because of how often they got out of their own end successfully.
Panthers defenceman Nate Schmidt predicted that would be the difference before his team made it the difference in its five-game win over the Hurricanes last year.
“I think the whole series is going to be based on what D-corps can get it to their forwards faster,” Schmidt said. “There's a lot of other parts this series — your special teams and all that stuff — but the underlying factor will be if we can get it to our guys faster than they can.”
How?
“It requires anything necessary because you can't be married to something in this series because it's going to be taken away,” said Schmidt. “I mean, it just is what it is. It's not going to always be perfect, you're not going to get the quick puck that you want all the time. It's going to be a greasy area along the walls; you have to be very OK in situations like that where it calls for something that you may not want to do. Eat it, dump it, chip it, you know?”
Just don’t reverse it repeatedly until you get caught on the wall and die with it.
Not getting caught on the wall on the power play will be another key for the Canadiens to win this series. They’ve done a good job of that through 14 playoff games, enabling them to connect for goals on 25 per cent of their 52 power plays.
But that’ll be harder against this Carolina penalty kill, which is hyper-aggressive and operating at 95 per-cent efficiency.
And even if Montreal’s big dogs find a way to eat on the power play, they’ll have to do some damage at even strength. Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky have been out-scored 10-3 at five-on-five in the playoffs, and not managing to even that out would probably spell the end of this run for the Canadiens.
“Guys have stepped up and helped us out,” said Suzuki, “and we’ve gotta return the favour and play a little better.”
At their best, like the rest of the Canadiens, they’re particularly dangerous on the rush and on the forecheck.
Those were the other elements of play that got this team to 106 points in the regular season and got it series wins over the Tampa Bay Lightning and Sabres. They must be strong versus Carolina.
The rest comes down to intangibles.
The first one being rest versus rust, with the Canadiens coming off a second seven-game series while the Hurricanes sat back and watched after having earned themselves a 12-day break between Game 4 of their sweep over the Flyers and Game 1 of this series.
The deeper this series goes, the harder you’d think it would be for the less-rested Canadiens.
Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour is unsure how it’ll go for his team at the start.
“The mental drain of playoff … it’s just like every night, you’re like, holy mackerel,” he said to reporters at Wednesday’s media availability in Raleigh. “To get away from it is good, but you don’t want to get too far away from it because you get out of the wheel, so to speak. That’s been the challenge. We’ve had two of those (breaks) this playoff, so it’s been kind of very interesting. Hopefully, the mental rest will pay off for us. I don’t know how it’s going to be, physically. We’ve had some time to heal up, but at the pace, I’m not sure how that’s going to translate. But we’ll find out.”
We’ll also find out just how the Canadiens, who were the youngest entrants to these playoffs, will handle their first experience in the conference final.
Meanwhile, it’s time to discover just how deep the scar tissue of playoffs past might be for the Hurricanes. The Panthers might not be here to haunt them, but we’ll see whether memories of losing 12 of their last 13 conference final games will.
5:29
