The Bell Centre was at full volume on Saturday night. Twenty thousand Canadiens fans, a playoff atmosphere that has rattled better road teams than the Buffalo Sabres, and a three-to-one lead inside the first ten minutes of a do-or-die game.
If there was ever a moment designed to end a season, this was it. Then Rasmus Dahlin decided it was not.
By the time the final horn sounded on an 8-3 Buffalo win that forced a decisive Game 7 on Monday in Buffalo, Dahlin had a goal and four assists. Five points in total.
He became the first defenseman in NHL history to record five points in a game when his team was facing elimination. The record had stood unbroken across every playoff in league history. One night in Montreal, the Sabres captain walked into that building and erased it.
“It’s an elimination game for us, and our captain steps up,” goaltender Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen said afterwards. “That’s how you lead a team. I think that’s been the whole year how well he has played. It’s not always if you’re the loudest on the bench or in the locker room. You take games over when you need to, and I think he very much showed it today.”
The record belonged to the forwards until Saturday. The last player to put up five points in any elimination game was Sean Couturier in 2018.
Dahlin is now in a group of five defensemen ever to record five points in a playoff game at all, joining Paul Coffey, Denis Potvin, Al MacInnis and Cale Makar. The difference is that none of them did it with their season on the line.
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A Night That Began With the Sabres Down Two Goals and Their Starting Goalie Getting Pulled
Dahlin actually scored first. Thirty-two seconds into the game, he drove to the net from the left side, deked around Juraj Slafkovsky and slid a backhand over Jakub Dobes to make it one-nothing.
The Bell Centre crowd, which had come in expecting a celebration, went quiet. Briefly.
Montreal answered with three goals on their next four shots. Arber Xhekaj tied it at 1:40. Ivan Demidov scored on the power play at 8:12.
Then Jake Evans scored short-handed and suddenly it was 3-1 and starter Alex Lyon was heading for the bench with the period barely half over.
From the outside looking in, the Sabres looked cooked. Their goalie was pulled, the crowd was rocking and they were two goals down in an elimination game in one of the loudest barns in hockey.
Inside the Buffalo bench, the read was different.
“We actually liked our game to start,” winger Jason Zucker said. “So it was kind of a let’s just stick with it. Keep playing downhill, playing after them and staying on our toes.”
That turned out to be exactly the right call. Luukkonen came on in relief and held Montreal scoreless for the final fifty minutes of the game.
The Sabres scored seven straight. Zucker started it with a power-play goal late in the first. Zach Benson tied it a minute into the second period.
Jack Quinn broke the tie on the power play and then scored again in the third. Konsta Helenius, twenty years old and playing in just his twelfth NHL game, scored for the second straight night.
Tage Thompson buried an empty net. Zach Metsa, playing his first career playoff game, scored in the final minutes.
Through all of it, Dahlin was the engine. He assisted on four of the seven unanswered goals, three of them on the power play where he runs the point for one of the better units in the league right now.
Buffalo went four-for-six with the man advantage on the night and Dahlin’s quarterback work was the reason the power play looked as clean as it did.
“Quick puck movement was the key,” he said.
Coach Lindy Ruff had spoken to his team that morning about indecision, about the slowness that had cost Buffalo in earlier games in the series.
His message, delivered in three letters he told the room to figure out themselves, was essentially to stop thinking and start moving.
His players took it to the most raucous environment in the series and produced the finest performance of the postseason.
“I’m very proud of our guys,” Ruff said. “We talked this morning about how everybody needs to play their best game. Our defining moment is this game tonight.”
Dahlin tied the Sabres franchise record for points in a playoff game, matching Derek Roy from 2006 and John Tucker from 1988.
He is the first Sabres defenseman to have more than three points in any playoff game ever. He also helped extend Thompson’s road multi-point streak to four games, the longest in franchise playoff history.
The Sabres improved to five wins and one loss on the road in these playoffs, which is a strange inversion given they are two wins and four losses at home.
Monday night in Buffalo is now a winner-take-all game. The Sabres and Canadiens have never played a Game 7 against each other before Saturday, which means whichever team advances will be doing it for the first time in franchise history.
The winner faces the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Final. Carolina has been sitting at home since May 9, having swept their first two series.
Dahlin was asked after the game whether the historic nature of the record had registered in the moment. He deflected it almost immediately, the way captains tend to do when individual milestones show up in team situations.
“I felt like the bench was alive the whole game,” he said.
He was right about that. But the bench was alive, in large part, because of him.
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