Oct 23, 2026 10:50 AM
After practice on Thursday, Jakub Dobes came back on his untimely penalty against the San Jose Sharks, and the way he chose to handle the matter was interesting.
On Thursday at practice, Jakub Dobes spoke to the media for the first time since he took an unfortunate penalty in the Montreal Canadiens’ last game against the San Jose Sharks, which cost the team a point. On Tuesday night, the media waited to talk to the netminder, but the Habs’ PR team couldn’t find him. Dobes explained that his name wasn’t on the board to speak when he got back to the dressing room, so he went to work out after the game.
It’s easy to imagine that the netminder had some anger to get rid of after that result, but he refused to call his penalty a mistake:
I wouldn’t call it a mistake; I mean, it’s unfortunate. Obviously, I don’t want to take a penalty during overtime, but in that situation, I felt like we were under pressure and a couple of guys were changing and tired, so it was my intuition to try and help the team. Unfortunately, it cost us. I feel like the play I was trying to make was to benefit the team, and unfortunately, it didn’t. I wouldn’t call it a mistake, but it is what it is.
That’s an interesting reaction from the goaltender, who could have offered a mea culpa of sorts but chose to defend his play, despite a couple of his teammates speaking out against the penalties called at the tail end of the game. Of course, nobody thought that Dobes was trying to get a penalty and just felt like getting in the way of the Sharks player just for fun, but given the fact that Martin St-Louis has often said that his players shouldn’t be giving the referees an opportunity to make a call, Dobes’ move was ill-advised at best.
Still, if he were put in a similar situation in the future, it would be surprising to see him make the same move. Overall, Dobes feels like he played a pretty good game and gave the team an opportunity to win, but they [including himself] need to be better at the end, have a better third period, not take dumb penalties, and he’s glad it happened at the start of the season rather than toward the end or during the playoffs.
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