Why The Habs Should Play Jakub Dobes More

Sure, Dobes was only around in the NHL for a little over half of the 2024-25 season, meaning it’s normal that he’ll have a lower amount of starts than he would have otherwise, but it seemed like there was sometimes too much pressure on Samuel Montembeault down the stretch. Montembeault is a good starting goalie, but he’s not an elite netminder, so his playing around the same amount of games as a guy like Jake Oettinger or Andrei Vasilevskiy, who are among the league’s best at the position.

Last season, Montembeault played an incredible 62 games and would often play 7 or 8 straight games during some of the most important stretches of the season. This would result in fatigue, which led to some really tough games by Montembeault that had messed up his final season stats.

During the games that Dobes started, he showed, for the most part, that he could handle the pressure and look good while doing it. This is why it was a bit of a head scratcher that he didn’t get some of the important games when Montembeault was clearly getting overplayed towards the end of the season. It may be risky to put a rookie in for important games, but it was clear that he could handle the pressure before the final stretch of the season.

Dobes started his NHL career with a 34-save shutout in a 4-0 win over the defending champion Florida Panthers. He became just the 5th goaltender to get a shutout in his first NHL game in Habs history. Following that, Dobes went on to win his first 5 NHL games, which made him the 4th in team history to do so. After his 5th win, his success slowed down a little, but he still finished last year with a 7-4-3 record and a respectable .909 save percentage.

The main reason that Dobes deserves more responsibility is because of how he managed to hold his own when being thrown in nets during the playoffs when Montembeault got hurt in the middle of Game 3 against the Washington Capitals. He came in a little cold, but managed to help the Habs win their only playoff game that night. He definitely wasn’t perfect against the Capitals, but Dobes was able to keep the massively underdog Habs team in the next 2 matchups before they bowed out in 5 games. Not to mention, he’s looked really good so far this preseason, allowing no goals through 3.5 periods of play, as the writing on this article.

Ideally, Dobes starts 25-30 games at the very least to give Montembeault more of a break and the ability to play more games at his peak performance. The average NHL starter, like Montembeault, should only play 50-55 games at most in today’s NHL. It will be interesting to see how Head Coach Martin St. Louis approaches his goaltender situation this year, but Dobes has proven that he’s a very solid backup goalie in the NHL thus far.

How many games do you see Jakub Dobes playing this season?