Yes. As of this morning, Jacob Fowler is Montreal's number-one goaltender and the Calder Trophy frontrunner, and anyone still hedging on that watched a different game than I did.
He stopped all 46 shots in a 2-0 win over the Blues in St. Louis on Tuesday night, a career high. Forty-two came at even strength, two on the power play, two shorthanded. Twenty-four landed in the third period alone, when the Blues outshot the Canadiens 24-3 and threw everything they had at him. He didn't crack. You don't back into a night like that against a team firing from every angle. He grabbed the job and isn't giving it back.
It wasn't his job to begin with, and that should make Montreal's front office squirm a little. The Canadiens went into the season planning to ride veterans Jakub Dobes and Samuel Montembeault, with Fowler stashed in Laval. Then Montembeault got hurt in practice, Dobes couldn't find his game, and the Habs had no choice but to call up their 21-year-old. He's made that plan look like a mistake, because he's been better than either man he was supposed to back up.
RatingThink about how close Montreal came to sitting on its best option all year. If Montembeault doesn't tweak something in practice, if Dobes puts together even a decent October, Fowler might be spending months in the minors while the big club scuffles behind two goalies who weren't getting it done. The Canadiens stumbled into the right answer, and the saves belong to Fowler alone.
The scouting world didn't see this coming either. Corey Pronman, back in his August pipeline work and again in January, was blunt that Fowler lacked premier NHL athleticism and projected as a quality backup, writing flatly that he doesn't have the tools to be a number-one goalie. It's a defensible bet on paper. Fowler isn't a towering, textbook athlete in the net. But a quality backup doesn't put together the kind of October Fowler just had, and that bet keeps looking worse by the week.
The records keep piling up. His 46 saves are the most by a Canadiens rookie in a shutout since shots were officially tracked in 1955-56, passing Cayden Primeau and Tony Esposito. It's the third-highest shutout save total in franchise history, behind only Jacques Plante and Montembeault himself. It was his second shutout of the season and his sixth straight win, and through seven starts he's 6-1-0 with a .942 save percentage and a 1.54 goals-against average. He leads the league in goals saved above expected and wins above replacement. Those leaderboard spots will move, but the saves already happened.
This is still seven NHL starts. Seventy-some games are still out there, and a 21-year-old can regress or get hurt, and an incumbent could complicate the picture by getting healthy. Anointing anyone a franchise goaltender off a couple of great weeks is how you end up looking silly in April. I'm not telling you Fowler is Carey Price's heir with a decade of this ahead of him. Nobody knows that yet.
What I'm telling you is that the question people are actually arguing about, who's the Canadiens' number one right now and who's the early Calder favorite, has an obvious answer. He took the net from two veterans and has given them no reason to ask for it back. The job is his until he plays his way out of it, and nothing about Tuesday suggests that's coming soon.
