Winners, losers from Wednesday’s Stanley Cup playoffs: Hurricanes continue to smother Canadiens
from Adam Gretz, with YardBarker.com/www.yardbarker.com
The Carolina Hurricanes are one step closer to making their first return to the Stanley Cup Final since the 2005-06 season. Thanks to their 4-0 win over the Montreal Canadiens on Wednesday night, they now have a 3-1 series lead and have a chance to close out the series back home on Friday night.
The Hurricanes are now 11-1 this postseason.
Here are some of the biggest winners and losers from Wednesday’s game.
Wednesday’s winners
Hurricanes: Road warriors. With Wednesday’s win, Carolina has now won its first six road games of the playoffs, making them just the seventh team in NHL history to ever accomplish that.
Granted, they are also 5-1 at home, which is also impressive, but a perfect 6-0 run on the road to open the playoffs is a massive feat.
K’Andre Miller, Carolina Hurricanes. Think the New York Rangers have some regrets about trading away Miller to a divisional rival before the start of the 2025-26 season?
If they did not already, they should now.
After a strong regular season that was arguably his best in the NHL, Miller has elevated his game to an entirely new level in the playoffs and might be one of Carolina’s best overall players right now.
He is dictating the pace of games when he is on the ice, contributing in all three zones and playing like a legitimate top-pairing defender.
The Taylor Hall-Logan Stankoven-Jackson Blake line. This trio played 9:34 of 5-on-5 ice time for the Hurricanes on Wednesday. In those nine minutes, they outscored Montreal 1-0, had a 28-4 shot attempt share, a 14-0 shots on goal advantage and 98.3% expected goal share.
Truly dominant showing. Game-changing showing.
Jakub Dobes, Montreal Canadiens. His team lost. But he is the one guy that you can not point the finger at. He has been the best goalie in the Stanley Cup Playoffs to this point and deserved a better result on Wednesday. Yeah, he allowed three goals. But Carolina probably should have scored six or seven goals, given the way the game was played.
He played as well as a goalie can play, given the circumstances.
If Montreal finds a way back into this series, he would be at the top of the Conny Smythe list.
He is going to need his teammates to step up for that to happen.
Wednesday’s losers
Montreal’s (lack of) offense. With only 18 shots on goal on Wednesday, that means Montreal has recorded just 43 shots on goal over the past three games.
Combined. Just for comparison’s sake, Carolina had 43 shots on goal in Game 4 on Wednesday night alone.
That is the worst three-game stretch in playoff history since shots on goal became an officially tracked stat.
The previous worst mark was 45 shots by the 1994-95 San Jose Sharks over a three-game stretch.
At one point in the third period on Wednesday, Canadiens fans began chanting “shoot the puck” at their team.
The message did not get through as Montreal was outshot 14-3 in the third period alone.
Montreal’s discipline. There were a lot of problems for the Canadiens on Wednesday, and there have been a lot of problems in this series. Discipline on Wednesday was one of them. They gave Carolina six power play opportunities, including an extended 5-on-3 advantage mid-way through the second period.
Montreal had just two power plays.
That is not exactly a winning formula when you are already struggling to generate offense.
Martin St. Louis timeout usage. In the grand scheme of things, this was not a big deal, but St. Louis using his only timeout after Carolina’s first goal so he could get an extended look at the replay to see if it was offside for a potential challenge was a pretty significant miss.
Not only was the play onside, without a challenge, but he really could have used that timeout a few minutes later in the period when Carolina scored two more goals to add on to the lead.
He has pushed most of the right buttons since taking over as the team’s head coach. That was not one of them.