Stanley Cup Playoffs Day 7: Habs, Bolts need OT again, Utah wins first home playoff game
The Stanley Cup Playoffs are back, which means that for the next two months, we’ll get non-stop action as we witness 16 teams get whittled down to the one that will be crowned as the 2026 Stanley Cup champions. Here at Daily Faceoff, we’ll be keeping you in the loop on everything that happens in the playoffs, every day until the Stanley Cup is hoisted in June.
Friday night saw three more series’ shift locations, and with each tied at 1-1, all were ultra-important swing games.
Hutson’s winner wraps up another tight affair
The Tampa Bay Lightning and Montreal Canadiens don’t know how to not play a close hockey game. The two teams have never been further than a goal apart through three games, and all three needed overtime. That continued to be the case for Game 3.
Alexandre Texier created bedlam in an already electric Montreal crowd with the opening goal five minutes in, but then the Lightning silenced the crowd for a bit with Brayden Point’s goal a few minutes later. Brandon Hagel scored five minutes into the second period to give Tampa the 2-1 lead, but Kirby Dach tied the game later in the period. Both teams traded chances for the remaining half of the game (including a couple Montreal breakaways), but overtime was required once again.
LANE HUTSON IS YOUR @ENERGIZER OVERTIME HERO! 🔵⚪️🔴 #StanleyCup
But we didn’t need too much extra time to decide this one. Lane Hutson blasted a shot from the point just two minutes in, and it beat Andrei Vasilevskiy to give the Habs the 3-2 win, and the 2-1 series lead.
Mammoth hold off four-goal lead to win first playoff game in Utah
While Buffalo and Montreal got a lot of attention for their crowds in the playoffs, Utah may have been the most fascinating. We’ve never witnessed the Utah hockey crowd in the postseason, so the environment was one to look forward too. And it certainly lived up to the hype.
Not only was the crowd intense, but the Utah Mammoth clearly fed off that energy. Mackenzie Weegar scored the first ever playoff goal in Utah midway through the first, and then Dylan Guenther added to that lead on the power play to make it 2-0 going into the second. Lawson Crouse scored twice in the second period to build on the lead even more, and the Mammoth had a stranglehold on the game up 4-0.
FIRST #STANLEYCUP PLAYOFF GOAL AT HOME FOR THE MAMMOTH! 🦣 🇺🇸: TBS 🇨🇦: @Sportsnet & @TVASports 2
Jack Eichel and Nic Dowd got a couple goals back, but that was as close as the Vegas Golden Knights got to tying it. Despite only having 12 shots in the game, Utah benefitted from a terrible game from Carter Hart and took Game 3 by a score of 4-2, as well as a 2-1 series lead. No one fed off the Utah energy more than Karel Vejmelka, who stopped 30 in the win.
Ducks take 2-1 series lead in another high-scoring game
Defense is not the friend of the Anaheim Ducks and Edmonton Oilers. Entering Game 3, the two teams had already combined for 17 goals, and that did not slow down on Friday night.
For a while, it was a back-and-forth game. The Oilers opened the scoring, the Ducks scored twice to take a 2-1 lead, Edmonton regained the lead at 3-2, and then Alex Killorn gave Anaheim a 3-3 tie going into the third. But the third was where the Ducks blew the game open a bit more. Beckett Sennecke and Leo Carlsson scored 42 second apart to make it 5-3, and while Connor McDavid finally got his first goal of the series (and his first point earlier in the game) to make it a one-goal game, Jeffrey Viel and Jackson LaCombe scored 90 seconds apart late in the game to wrap up the game at 7-4.
With the win, the Ducks take a 2-1 lead in the series, while Mikael Granlund lead the way offensively with a goal and three points.