Habs and Leafs officially reveal starting goalie for opening night in Toronto

The Montreal Canadiens are going with Jakub Dobes tonight in Toronto, and Sergei Bobrovsky will be at the other end of the ice.

TVA Sports insider Renaud Lavoie laid out the goalie matchup Tuesday. It's the first regular-season game of the year for both clubs, and nobody gets a soft landing.

Opening night in Toronto is a driver's test on the 401 at rush hour. Everybody's watching, and one bad lane change gets replayed all week.

The Canadiens made the right call anyway. If Dobes is going to be the guy, finding out on night one beats finding out in February.

Montreal rolled through exhibition play at 4-1-0, though the last tune-up ended in a 4-3 loss in Ottawa last Saturday.

Rust or rest? The Leafs went 2-1-1 and haven't played since a 4-2 win in Ottawa last Wednesday.

It's also the first of four meetings between these Atlantic Division rivals, and the next one lands back in Toronto on November 7.

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Jakub Dobes gets massive test against Leafs on opening night

Jim Hiller coaches his first regular-season game since the Leafs hired him in June, and every lineup call he makes tonight gets graded for real.

Martin St-Louis brings the opposite résumé. He has run the Montreal bench since February 2022, long enough that none of this is new to him.

The Leafs pay Auston Matthews $13,250,000 and William Nylander $11,500,000, and that money exists for nights exactly like this one.

Montreal's priciest defenseman, Noah Dobson, carries a $9,500,000 cap hit. The Canadiens need that blue line keeping traffic out of their goalie's eyes.

After tonight, the Canadiens visit Pittsburgh on Saturday before the home opener against Carolina on October 6, the start of a four-game homestand.

That stretch ends with Buffalo on October 13, and the Canadiens are in Washington the very next night for the first back-to-back of the year.

The Leafs get three straight at home to open, then head west to Vegas, Colorado and Utah.

Nobody in Montreal will care about the preseason by Wednesday morning. What they'll be talking about is whether Dobes held his ground against Bobrovsky, and what comes next if he didn't.

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