If you’ve been paying attention to this series, you know who’s going to win. But here are reasons for both team's logical victory anyway.
www.nytimes.com
"Montreal will win because: They can actually trust their goaltender
We’ll start with the easy one. As always when it comes to a winner-take-all hockey game, we can approach this from a dozen different angles. We can dig into increasingly obscure stats. Or we can babble about vibes and narratives and all the rest of that nonsense.
Or we can just accept that the team with the best goaltending will win. Like they always do.
And in this series, only one team has any reason to have much confidence in their goaltending. Granted, Jakub Dobes is coming off a rough one in Game 6, a performance that saw him yanked for the first time this spring while driving his series save percentage down to .884. That’s not ideal, I’ll grant you.
But it’s still better than what the Sabres are facing. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen was supposed to be The Guy in Buffalo for this playoff run, but he almost immediately lost his job to Alex Lyon. Now Lyon has presumably lost it back, with Luukkonen expected to get the nod tonight. Is that the right call? And if he gets off to a slow start, how short should the leash be? Knowing his team doesn’t fully believe in him, can he shake off a bad break or tough goal, or will he crumble in the bright lights?
The Habs don’t really have those questions. After seeing Martin St. Louis stick with Dobes through a shaky start in Game 5, we know he’s all-in on his starter.
There’s an old hockey cliche that says if you’ve got two starting goalies, you don’t have any. Montreal has one and they know it. The Sabres are running out of time to figure it out."
