Jakub Dobes made 36 saves. Andrei Svechnikov still found the net.
That is the story of what happened at the Bell Centre on Sunday night, when Carolina Hurricanes left Montreal with a 3-2 overtime win and a 2-1 Eastern Conference Finals lead that the Canadiens will find deeply frustrating. They did almost everything you could ask of a team trying to hold their season together, including keeping one of the Eastern Conference’s top offences to two regulation goals, and they still lost.
Svechnikov scored at 14:06 of overtime to end it.
How the game unfolded
Shayne Gostisbehere and Taylor Hall put Carolina in front in regulation. Mike Matheson and Lane Hutson replied for the home side, ensuring the Bell Centre remained loud and that Dobes’s heroics were not in vain. At the other end, Frederik Andersen faced far less pressure: Montreal managed 13 shots on goal against him across 65 minutes, but made every save count when it mattered.
Carolina had 39 shots on Dobes. In most games, that produces a comfortable win. On Sunday, it produced a 3-2 scoreline that stretched into overtime, because Dobes was making saves that goals on target should not survive.
Then Svechnikov, again.
Two overtime wins in a row
This is the detail Carolina’s opponents will note. Montreal won Game 1 in Raleigh. The Hurricanes have won the two games since, both in overtime, both requiring more than 60 minutes to settle. Game 2 at home. Game 3 on the road. The Hurricanes have not won a regulation game in this series. What they have done is close out two tight games when it counted most.
That is not a comfortable way to build a series lead, but it is a series lead.
The Dobes factor
Svechnikov settled the game, but Dobes is the story Montreal will hold onto. He has made 363 saves in the 2026 playoffs, the most of any goalie still active. His 36-stop performance in Game 3 against 39 Carolina shots reflects what this series has looked like: the Hurricanes pressing, Montreal defending, and Dobes keeping his team alive.
That 13-shot count from Montreal tells you what the Canadiens are up against. They are not generating at Carolina’s level. They are surviving on Dobes’s brilliance and converting when they do get through. That is a difficult balance to sustain over a full series, but they have sustained it through three games.
What it means
Carolina lead 2-1. Game 4 is tonight at the Bell Centre (8pm ET, TNT/CBC). A Hurricanes win pushes the series to 3-1 and brings it back to Raleigh, where the Hurricanes finished the regular season as the Eastern Conference’s top team: 53-22-7, 113 points.
For Montreal, tonight is a must-win. Falling 3-1 at home would put them in a position from which almost no team recovers. They have Dobes, they have Matheson and Hutson as scoring threats, and they have shown they can hold Carolina for long stretches. But the shot differential across this series is a problem that one strong performance cannot solve alone.
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