The Canadiens’ crease has turned into the team’s biggest week-to-week swing, and right now Jacob Fowler is the guy driving the conversation.
What looked like a straightforward goalie plan has been scrambled in a hurry. Samuel Montembeault went down with a lower-body injury in practice last Wednesday, and the expected recovery timeline is 10 to 14 days. That forced the Canadiens to turn to Fowler, recalled from the AHL’s Laval Rocket, and the rookie was handed three straight starts after Jakub Dobes got off to a rough beginning.
Fowler made the most of the opportunity. Over those three games, he went 2-1 with a 1.91 goals-against average and a .906 save percentage.
The stretch included a 30-save shutout in a 1-0 win over the Detroit Red Wings last Saturday at the Bell Centre, plus a perfect effort in the shootout as he stopped all six Detroit attempts. He followed that with a 13-of-16 performance in a 4-3 shootout win against the Buffalo Sabres on Tuesday night at the Bell Centre.
Dobes, meanwhile, was the choice in Washington on Wednesday for the second game of a back-to-back, and it went the wrong direction fast. He surrendered five goals on 24 shots in a 5-4 loss to the Capitals, with two of those goals looking like saves he should have had.
That leaves Dobes at 1-2-1 with a 4.63 GAA and an .842 save percentage, and it puts Montreal close to the three-goalie problem it wanted to avoid.
The Canadiens were hoping Dobes would lock down the No. 1 job after signing a three-year extension this summer that begins next season and carries an annual salary-cap hit of US$5.357 million. The idea was for Montembeault to rebound from a rough season and settle in as a dependable backup while also boosting his trade value in the final year of his contract. Fowler, in that plan, would keep getting plenty of work in Laval.
Instead, the depth chart has shifted almost overnight. Fowler now has to be viewed as the No. 1 goalie, and he should be back in net Saturday when the Canadiens host the Sabres at the Bell Centre at 7 p.m. on SNE and TVA Sports.
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Looking back from 2014 through 2022, the ledger is mixed in a way that still matters to this franchise. Some classes produced useful NHL pieces and a few real impact players, but too many selections never reached the league in a meaningful way or could not hold onto a job once they got there, and the 2020 group is now looking especially thin with Yan Kuznetsov the lone full-time NHLer from that class. [Read more 🡒]