Montreal Canadiens goaltender Jakub Dobes has been the team's most consistent performer in their third-round matchup with the Carolina Hurricanes.Karl B DeBlaker/The Associated Press
Jakub Dobes turned 25 on Wednesday, and you could say it was bittersweet.
On one hand, the Montreal Canadiens goalie was bombarded with 43 shots on goal in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference final against the Carolina Hurricanes, and his team lost to dig themselves a 3-1 series deficit. There have been better presents.
On the other hand, as Dobes put it in a typically quirky postgame media scrum: “20,000 people came to my birthday.”
He was joking, but he wasn’t wrong. If Habs fans have a favourite player right now, amid their existential angst, it is certainly Dobes. The Czech rookie was brilliant on Wednesday night, despite the final score of 4-0, stopping 40 of those shots and all but standing on his head to keep his team in the game.
The crowd showed its approval in a way the droll goaltender would appreciate. When the Hurricanes rang a shot off the crossbar of an empty net in the third period, with Dobes already on the bench for an extra attacker, the Bell Centre started chanting “Doby! Doby! Doby!” as if their wunderkind had made the save himself.
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Dobes has been the breakout star of these playoffs for Montreal, and become a folk hero in the process. Remarkably, on a team full of beloved young stars, no player gets a louder ovation during introductions at the Bell Centre.
That was especially true on Wednesday, when former Habs goalie Jaroslav Halak carried the ceremonial torch into the arena along with a STOP sign bearing Dobes’s name – a newly popular accessory that harkens to similar signs that appeared during Halak’s star-making playoff run in 2010. The building went into a frenzy.
The Canadiens have a history of rookie netminders coming out of nowhere to carry the team to glory. Ken Dryden did it in 1971 and Patrick Roy repeated the feat in 1986. It now seems likelier that Dobes’s heroics will end in glorious failure, but he has already etched his name in Habs history with this spring’s performance.
More than that, he has endeared himself to Montreal with a personality that stands out from the guarded stoicism of many pro athletes. Goalies are often more enigmatic or eccentric than their teammates – think of Dryden’s bookishness and Roy’s swagger – but even by those slightly elevated standards, Dobes is a delight.
Dobes made 40 saves in a losing effort on Wednesday night. The 25-year-old quickly shook off the result and was feeding his teammates positivity ahead of Friday's Game 5.Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
Hockey fans outside of Montreal got a taste of Dobes’s guileless charm following the Canadiens’ Game 7 victory against the Buffalo Sabres in the second round. After backstopping the team’s dramatic overtime win, he was asked by a reporter about his mentality going into the game.
“My mindset was just telling them, ‘Not now. Not this time. They won’t score. Nope,’” he replied earnestly.
When asked at the time how he was holding up after 14 gruelling playoff games, Dobes sounded genuinely shocked by the question. “Me?! Oh, I could play 40 more.”
There is something irrepressible and genuine about the young man that comes across in his game. He loves to play the puck, sometimes to the consternation of head coach Martin St. Louis, and defends his crease with unusually feisty poke checks. After whistles he is known to mix it up with opposing players, displaying more emotion than goalies are taught to show.
Following one such altercation, Habs forward Juraj Slafkovsky backed his goalie up. “Did he hit somebody? Probably, right? But I think that’s good. That gives him confidence.”
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Dobes was relatively unheralded as a junior player, and Montreal took him with the 136th overall pick in the fifth round of the 2020 draft. He was only called up to the big team in 2024, before finally settling into a regular role with the Canadiens this season; alternating with the disappointing veteran Samuel Montembeault and the 21-year-old sensation Jacob Fowler, Dobes played his way into the starting spot down the stretch before evolving into a game-changing force during the playoffs.
His 2.53 goals-against-average and .912 save percentage in the postseason are strong but don’t do justice to how pivotal Dobes has been to a trigger-shy team that has often been outshot two-to-one. The Canadiens especially leaned on their goalie in consecutive Game 7 wins against Tampa and Buffalo, when Dobes made 28 and 37 saves respectively, allowing just three goals total.
Even in defeat he has rarely been at fault. On off nights for the Habs, Dobes is usually the standout performer, a beacon of stability and good humour on an inexperienced team that sometimes seems daunted by the pressure of playing in a city as hockey-mad as Montreal.
As defenceman Lane Hutson said in a grim postgame interview after Game 4, “It seemed like the only guy who showed up was Doby.”
The Canadiens will have to ride Dobes's attitude as much as his play in this series, if they're going to chip into the 3-1 deficit they face against the Hurricanes.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
The mood in the locker room was bleak on Wednesday night, but Dobes delivered a dose of the off-beat positivity that is becoming his brand. If the Canadiens are going to climb out of this hole and play for the Stanley Cup, they will have to ride his attitude as much as his play.
“I mean, yeah, it sucks right now, but tomorrow is a new day,” he said. “We’re an amazing group full of exciting people, we’ll have a great time on the plane, we’ll go for a team dinner, we’ll joke around and we’ll bring our best hockey for Game 5.”
This was no time for celebrating, not yet, not by a long shot – but it was his birthday after all, and he had earned a small indulgence.
“My brother is here, my Mom’s right here. So I’ve got a cake. I’ll just go home and eat some cake.”