You can almost feel the hyperbole boiling below the surface when it comes to Montreal Canadiens goaltender Jakub Dobes. Talking heads and NHL scribes alike are quick to anoint young stars with titles that can lead to I-told-you-so moments down the road for them. The conversations surrounding players can sometimes lead to unfair--or unrealistic--expectations, and it seems like the 24-year-old is just a few more strong postseason starts away from being called the next great "money goalie."
Through the first round, it would be impossible to argue that Dobes wasn't exactly that. His performance in Game 7 alone will go down in Canadiens lore as one of the most spectacular individual efforts in franchise history. To wit: this team isn't where it is without the heroics of the former fifth-round pick. That all goes out the window in the second round, however, and the Buffalo Sabres represent a whole new set of problems for the Habs to deal with.
Montreal hung tough with the Lightning, with every game in the series being decided by one goal. Dobes won four of them, obviously, but there isn't a whole lot of wiggle room for him to revert back to his early-season form, either. Doing so, even for a night or two, could be the difference in this series between two Eastern Conference upstarts.
Jakub Dobes Ffaces a defining test against high-octane Sabres
He's been great since the Olympic break, but so have the Sabres. And Dobes may need to be even better than he was in round one for Montreal to advance. Fifteen goalies have appeared in at least four games this postseason, and his 2.9 goals saved above expected ranks sixth out of that group. As good as he's been, Dobes hasn't been preventing the floodgates from opening like Dan Vladar or Frederik Andersen.
The 6-foot-4 netminder has been wiser about picking his spots in terms of skating out to meet shooters and cutting off angles, but can still get caught leaning off of his posts when anticipating shots down low. This is a fast, forecheck-heavy, opportunistic team that Dobes will be facing, and he'll have virtually no room to step back in terms of preventing goals on odd-man rushes, from high-danger areas or on broken plays.
Tampa couldn't quite solve him enough--especially in Game 7--but the Sabres lean even more on plays made in transition. Dobes settled his happy feet down over the last several months, but if any of those tendencies start to creep back into his game, it would be catastrophic for the Canadiens.
The flipside possibility exists, too, of course. Dobes could continue to play at the level he has been, thwarting Buffalo's east-to-west chances while standing up to any traffic in front of him. Another string of one-goal victories would go a long way toward solidifying him as the kind of money goalie Montreal hasn't been able to deploy since prime Carey Price. But the room is still there for him to be more like Jaroslav Halak--a goalie who had a tremendous stretch of games, but couldn't quite put the pieces together enough to be consistently excellent.
Dobes is a young goalie with many chapters in his story left to be written. There's simply no margin for error as the Canadiens take the ice against Buffalo for Game 1 on Wednesday.
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