Jacob Fowler wasn't supposed to be here. A month ago he was Montreal's third goalie, stashed behind Samuel Montembeault and Jakub Dobeš, the kind of prospect you mention in passing when someone asks about the team's pipeline. He's here because Montembeault got hurt in practice and Dobeš hasn't been good enough to hold the net. Now the kid who was an afterthought in September is the best player on the Canadiens' roster.
Tuesday night in St. Louis he made it undeniable. Forty-six saves, his second shutout of the season and third of his career, against a Blues team that put 46 shots on him and spent the final stretch of the third period laying siege with the extra attacker. Montreal won 2-0 on goals from Zachary Bolduc, scoring against the team that drafted him, and Florian Xhekaj, who got his first NHL goal in the process. Neither goal would have mattered if Fowler hadn't turned the third period into a one-man wall while St. Louis outshot Montreal 24-3 over those twenty minutes.
The argument that he needs more time in the minors was always going to collapse the moment he had a night like this, and he'd basically been building toward it for two weeks. He started the season as the emergency option, won six of his first seven starts, and two days before the Blues game nearly pitched a shutout in the Heritage Classic outdoor game before Winnipeg finally broke through late. Tuesday was the make-good. Stopping a team cold for a third of a game, on the road, with his own coach choosing to live or die with him in net, isn't something you can wave off.
RatingThe caution is real: it's a dozen games into a season, and goaltenders who look unbeatable in October have cratered by Christmas before. Nobody's handing him a plaque yet. But the people treating this outing with suspicion are missing what happened. St. Louis was in its own offensive funk, shut out in consecutive games, and still generated enough quality and volume that a lesser goalie loses this game by two or three. Fowler faced 46 real shots and stopped every one of them.
Credit goes in two directions. Fowler has built the case for himself with his glove and his positioning. And the Montreal coaching staff, who had every conventional reason to lean back toward the more pedigreed, more experienced Dobeš, kept trusting a 21-year-old call-up because the games in front of them said to. That decision is paying off, start after start.
After the game, Fowler pointed at his defense: "I think we put a lot of emphasis on the D of having good box outs, and I thought they were terrific tonight." Deflect all you want. The box score says otherwise. Forty-six saves is a goaltender refusing to let a game slip. He's done it enough times now that it's just who he is.
