DENVER — From 3,000 kilometres away, not even I could shake the funny feeling that, despite having to overcome a three-goal deficit with 20 minutes to play, the Montreal Canadiens would be just fine against the Tampa Bay Lightning if they could somehow manage not to allow one more shot on net.
I somehow doubt Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes were laughing as they watched the very next one come from a terrible angle to cleanly beat Samuel Montembeault just 1:22 into the third period.
If it wasn’t right then and there that they decided to call up Jacob Fowler to the Canadiens, I’d be shocked.
The president of hockey operations and the general manager were probably thinking about it after Jakub Dobes was beat for a third time on Tampa’s first 14 shots. And if they weren’t sure before Montembeault gave up that terrible one to Darren Raddysh at the start of the third period, they had to have been dead certain after Raddysh beat him with another one from 60 feet out to cement this 6-1 embarrassment on home ice.
Enter Fowler, who’s joining the Canadiens ahead of games in Pittsburgh and New York, along with Owen Beck and Adam Engstrom.
The 21-year-old has a 10-5-0 record with the Laval Rocket this season, and he’s sporting the fourth-best save percentage (.919) of any American Hockey League goaltender to have appeared in at least 10 games.
There are no expectations for Fowler to be the saviour, just some that he can provide a parachute for Dobes, who doesn’t even have a ripcord to pull right now.
Don’t get me wrong. Dobes has been relatively solid, if not great compared to Montembeault, whose confidence has been stripped completely bare since suffering a groin tear in last season’s playoffs.
But asking the Czech netminder to be both 1A and B for the Canadiens, at 24 years old, with just 36 games of NHL experience under his belt, is simply asking too much of him. And it stands to reason Gorton and Hughes aren’t asking anything else of Fowler than to make his NHL debut at some point over this short trip through Pennsylvania and New York and lend some support to Dobes.
They might have done it weeks earlier had the Canadiens’ defensive game not been even more fallible than it was on Tuesday.
Of course, that performance — and some of the poor ones that preceded very strong efforts against Winnipeg, Toronto, and even St. Louis — was influenced by the all-too-familiar deflation of feeling like any and every shot against could go in.
The Canadiens had five great ones to the Lightning’s one on Tuesday before Dobes got beat by Brayden Point.
It’s not like it was his fault after Jayden Struble abandoned the main principle of defending — playing the man instead of the puck — to allow Point a free path to the net. Nor was Dobes to blame for the breakaway goal Pontus Holmberg potted just under four minutes later.
But he was visibly shaken after that, and the Canadiens were clearly rattled because this has happened too often to them so far this season.
“I feel (the deflation),” coach Martin St. Louis told reporters at the Bell Centre after the game. “I physically, myself, feel it.”
He talked about shaking it off and getting back to the game, which the Canadiens didn’t do before they left Dobes flailing to try to stop a Nikita Kucherov shot that made it 3-0 Lightning with just under three minutes to play in the first period.
A lapse in concentration from Brendan Gallagher, a breakdown in attempted recovery from Mike Mathson and Alex Carrier, and Montembeault’s inability to clean that up left the Canadiens down 4-0 and playing the rest of the game with no margin for error.
They had started the second period with three shots on goal and given up none before Charle-Edouard D’Astous took advantage of that situation for that 4-0 goal, and they finished it with a goal and a 10-3 shot advantage before the first shot Montembeault faced in the third period broke their will.
It only cratered Montembeault’s confidence further, and there’s no way Gorton and Hughes could watch that — and the second goal given to Raddysh moments later — and come away thinking his best path to redeeming it is over the next couple of games the Canadiens have to play this week.
Montembeault’s had a break of late to work on his game. It was a longer break than anticipated due to illness that made him unavailable to start against St. Louis.
But now he needs another one.
Recalling Kaapo Kahkonen to offer it, only to later expose Kahkonen to waivers to return him to Laval, would be too risky given the goaltending needs of several other teams in the league. Potentially losing Kahkonen for nothing would leave Fowler much more exposed in the AHL than he will be over what’s more than likely to be a short stint in the NHL.
The upside is there for the goaltender to extend his stay with a great run of play, to provide Dobes some support and gain some critical NHL experience. The risk that Fowler’s confidence would be cratered by a bad NHL debut can’t be as great as some would make it out to be.
If that’s all it would take to seriously set Fowler back, then he’s already been severely overestimated by the Canadiens as their future starter.
If Gorton and Hughes were so concerned about it, Fowler wouldn’t have been recalled.
At least one person beneath them would’ve told them not to lose a half second of sleep over it.
Remember Boston-based amateur scout Billy Ryan pounding the table for Gorton and Hughes to take Fowler in the 2023 draft?
The Canadiens had other priorities with their first three picks — taking David Reinbacher fifth overall before trading the 31st and 37th that year for Alex Newhook — but if they didn’t hesitate to snag Fowler at 69th with their first opportunity to take a goaltender, it had as much to do with his ability as it did his character and mental resilience.
It’s time to put it to the test and incentivize the Canadiens to immediately redeem the defensive alertness with which they played in the three games prior to Tuesday’s game against Tampa.
With an unrelenting schedule and ground to be held in an insanely tight Eastern Conference playoff race, it’s what this team needs right now.
It needs Engstrom keeping Struble on his toes, Beck bringing the level of detail that still makes him an appealing prospect, and a goaltender with swagger.
Fowler built his up at every other level and isn’t going to lose it overnight.
