As expected, Jakub Dobes was back in the net for the Montreal Canadiens on Sunday afternoon as they took on the Carolina Hurricanes in the second game of their back-to-back. However, someone who wasn’t back was Josh Anderson, who must still have been affected by the illness, which made him leave Saturday’s game. With Alexandre Texier still in Montreal, nursing a lower-body injury, Martin St-Louis opted to insert Arber Xhekaj in the lineup as a fourth liner.

Patrik Laine is travelling with the team, and while he is technically still on IR, he’s been a full participant in practice for the last two months. In the run-up to the trade deadline, he hoped to be traded, and in his wife’s blog on deadline day, she said they were happy to stay in Montreal if it meant Laine could get to play. In one episode of the Basu and Godin notebook, Arpon Basu and Marc-Antoine Godin spoke about the big Finn’s predicament and said they believed the Canadiens had agreed to keep him on injured reserve rather than have him be a healthy scratch again.

Whatever the case may be, though, the fact that the coach opted to use Xhekaj in a position he had never played before, with the stakes so high, just tells us everything we need to know.

Just like in Tuesday’s game, the Hurricanes took the Canadiens’ zone by storm in the first period. There were only eight minutes left in the first when Montreal finally got its first shot on goal through Zachary Bolduc, and had it not been for Dobes, the Habs would have been trailing by much more than one goal.

He stopped 12 of the 13 shots he faced, and while Carolina does shoot from everywhere on the ice, the netminder still has to make those saves, and he made them. While he may not look as calm or as in control in his net as Carey Price once was, but he does ooze confidence, and that’s great for the team.

All through the game, he was there and making the big saves, only surrendering that one goal in the first frame. 

Despite the Hurricanes dominating puck possession, shots, and the physical side of the game with more hits, the Canes still found themselves trailing 3-1 after the second frame. In that period, the Habs scored three unanswered goal and Nick Suzuki took part in each of them, scoring two and assisting on Cole Caufield’s 46th of the season.

That gave the captain 91 points on the season, two more than he had in 82 games last season. At 26 years old, the centerman just keeps improving year after year, and it doesn’t even look like we’ve seen the best of him yet. After all, both of his linemates are younger and still improving as players; the better they get, the more successful the captain will be.

For the first time since 2017, the Canadiens won a fifth consecutive game in regulation. Given the fact that regulation wins are a tie breaker if there’s a tie in points at the end of the season, this is huge. Montreal now has 30 regulation wins, the same number as the Boston Bruins. The Habs remain two points ahead of Boston, four points ahead of the Columbus Blue Jackets, and eight points ahead of the ninth-place Ottawa Senators. 

With that win, the Canadiens stay four points behind the Tampa Bay Lightning, who also won on Sunday, and as luck would have it, they are their next opponents on Tuesday. Last season, when the stakes were this high and the Canadiens needed a point to qualify for the playoffs, they struggled to get it as if the pressure was too much to handle. This year, with the pressure just as high, they have a five-game winning streak, which says a lot about this young team's progress. 

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