CANADIENS
Montreal

SABRES
Buffalo

Lineup

Forward lines and defense pairings 

[one_half]Byron – Drouin – Gallagher
Galchenyuk – De La Rose – Lehkonen
Scherbak – L. Shaw – Carr
Deslauriers – Froese – Hudon
[/one_half]

[one_half_last]Reilly – Petry
Alzner – Juulsen
Benn – Lernout

[/one_half_last]

Goaltenders

Niemi
Price

Scratches

Michael McCarron

Injuries

Ales Hemsky – concussion, Shea Weber – lower-body, Victor Mete – hand, Max Pacioretty – lower-body, David Schlemko – undisclosed, Rinat Valiev – lower-body, Phillip Danault – upper body, Andrew Shaw – upper-body

Game Report 

In January, from the press box of KeyBank Center in Buffalo, Rasmus Dahlin looked exceptionally good. He was third among defenceman in scoring at the 2018 World Junior Championship. There is a good chance that Dahlin will take to the KeyBank ice in October for the Sabres home opener.

As bad as the Canadiens have been this season — and rest assured, they are a very bad hockey team — the Sabres are much worse.

While the home team was taking another step towards the Dahlin sweepstakes, Marc Bergevin and Trevor Timmins were in Halifax taking a long look at Filip Zadina, as his Mooseheads opened the playoffs against Baie-Comeau Drakkar. Zadina was second in goal scoring with seven goals in seven games at the World Juniors.

And that’s where fans were positioned tonight, trying to generate enthusiasm to watch two terrible teams jockeying for the best draft position. It was a painful game to watch.

There were some highlights. But sadly, it was the Sabres ineptitude that made the Habs look good.

The Canadiens have the worst road record in the league with a single digit number in wins away from the Bell Centre coming into this game. But Buffalo’s worst home record with just 11 wins at KeyBank would triumph on this night.

The Sabres anemic power-play was the antidote to the Canadiens road penalty-kill woes, dead last in the league. One Buffalo scribe wrote that the Sabres struggled to exit their zone with the man advantage. Even at 5-on-3, the home team could not cash in.

As much as we have talked about the Canadiens inability to score this season, we can see that other teams suffer the same condition. Sam Reinhart, Jack Eichel and Ryan O’Reilly each had multiple chances to bury the puck but could not. O’Reilly stared at an open cage with Antti Niemi down and out on more than one occasion.

Remember complaining that Canadiens forwards were making opposing goalies look like stars?

On Niemi’s game, former NHL goaltender Martin Biron said that he was out of position all night. He is not wrong. The lack of finish by Buffalo shooters was the primary reason for Niemi’s first shutout of the season and his first since December 2015. Niemi was selected as the game’s first star.

There was some genuine good news and that came courtesy of Artturi Lehkonen, who scored the game-winner. Lehkonen’s goal, his fifth in the last eight games, was assisted by Jacob De La Rose and Alex Galchenyuk. The line continued its strong play as each member of the trio is playing his best hockey of the year.

It’s not harsh to say that these are two very bad teams. The Canadiens swept the four-game series. In regulation time, the Sabres scored just three goals in those four games, while the Habs scored seven (non empty-net) goals.

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▲  Artturi Lehkonen, Jacob De La Rose, Brett Lernout

▼  Nicolas Deslauriers, Byron Froese, Karl Alzner

1. Antti Niemi  MTL
2. Artturi Lehkonen  MTL
3. Linus Ullmark  MTL

• “It’s always good to win on the road. And we know the circumstances. There’s two teams here playing each other that are out of the playoffs. A lot of it is for honor. A lot of it is for guys showing their professionalism and trying to keep jobs and fighting for jobs and all that stuff.”

Sabres forward Ryan O’Reilly

• “We definitely beat ourselves tonight. They didn’t do anything special. We missed the chances, didn’t handle the puck as good as we wanted to tonight. I think all the guys felt the same, it’s almost embarrassing. We could’ve at least made a game of it.”

Sabres head coach Phil Housley

• “Again we’re forcing things that aren’t there and we fed it to them. It wasn’t anything that Montreal did, it’s what we didn’t do once again.”

Quotes courtesy of NHL.com