Jakub Dobeš has spent the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs doing what the Montreal Canadiens needed most: keeping them in it. The 24-year-old goalie has been a pivotal player against the Tampa Bay Lightning, and even after Montreal’s 3-2 loss in Game 4, he had more than held his own through the first four games of the series.
That has meant matching, and at times exceeding, the play of Andrei Vasilevskiy, a task few goaltenders can manage for long. Dobeš has done it with smart reads, excellent depth control and a fearless aggression that has become his calling card, charging out of his crease to smother shots before they reach the blue paint.
He was doing it from the opening minutes. Less than five minutes into Game 1, Dobeš turned aside a chance from Tampa Bay’s Erik Cernak. In Game 3, he stopped Gage Goncalves and then stood at Bell Centre after another raucous night in Montreal, talking about the atmosphere as if he were still trying to take it in.
“I’m just getting used to how amazing of fans we have,” Dobeš said after that game. “You can’t prepare for what they do here, it’s unbelievable. But this is what we work for.”
The performance is coming from a goalie who arrived at this level quickly and, in some ways, unexpectedly. Dobeš had a brief two-year career at Ohio State University, where he met goalie coach Dustin Carlson in 2021 as a freshman. Carlson said the young netminder already had elite skating, crisp movement and the kind of frame that made him hard to miss.
“When he got to us, his skating was already elite,” Carlson said. “Every movement was crisp, hard and agile.”
Carlson, who coached Ohio State’s goalies from 2017 to 2024, said the clues were obvious even then. “Right away, you’re like, if this guy is 6-foot-4 and can move like that, as long as he can stop pucks, he’s going to the NHL,” he said.
Dobeš loved hockey, winning and Chinese food buffets when Carlson met him in 2021, and he gave Ohio State plenty to celebrate. He was a two-time semifinalist for the Mike Richter Award and was named the Big Ten goaltender of the year in 2022 before moving on. He later led all rookies with 29 wins in the regular season and took over Montreal’s starting job on Jan. 27.
Since then, the numbers have backed up the eye test. Dobeš led the NHL with 17.99 goals saved above expected from Jan. 27 on and finished with 14 wins over that span, trailing only Vasilevskiy and Jake Oettinger in that stretch. That is why Montreal, which is now trying to push the series back in its favor after Game 4, has leaned on him so heavily.
The tension in this matchup is that Dobeš has done enough to give Montreal a chance, but the Canadiens still face a Tampa Bay team with the kind of finishing power that can punish even the best goaltending. For now, the story of the series is not that Montreal has found a perfect answer in net. It is that it found one good enough to keep the fight alive.
And for a goalie who started this climb at Ohio State just a few years ago, that may be the clearest sign yet that the leap has stuck.