Jacob Fowler made a career-high 46 saves on Tuesday night, and the Montreal Canadiens beat the St. Louis Blues 2-0 at Enterprise Center in St. Louis.
FINAL: Montreal Canadiens 2, St. Louis Blues 0. The Jacob Fowler 46 saves performance was the whole story: Montreal was outshot 46-20, took no lead until the second period, and still left with its third straight road win because its 21-year-old rookie goaltender stopped everything, including 24 shots in the third period alone.
Jacob Fowler 46 Saves, 24 Of Them In The Third
The first period finished scoreless, and that was the calm part of the night. St. Louis kept building pressure as the game went on, and by the third period the Blues were throwing everything at a one-goal game. Fowler stopped 24 shots in the final 20 minutes, the largest single-period workload of his young career, and he saved his busiest sequence for the last two minutes, turning away Connor McMichael, Colton Parayko, Jimmy Snuggerud, Jake Neighbours and Dylan Holloway in a closing flurry while his teammates blocked what they could in front of him.
The underlying numbers say the same thing the eye test did. St. Louis generated chances worth about 4.42 expected goals and scored none of them. Montreal blocked 18 shots and killed all three Blues power plays, but the structure only held because Fowler never gave the home crowd the goal it kept expecting. Jordan Binnington made 18 saves on 20 shots at the other end and lost a game his team controlled for long stretches.
This is also a shutout built undermanned. Montreal played without captain Nick Suzuki, forward Ivan Demidov and goaltender Samuel Montembeault, all injured, and handed Cole Caufield an alternate captain’s letter for the night. A team missing that much of its spine does not win a road game in which it is outshot by 26 unless the goaltender steals it, and Fowler stole it.
Bolduc Scores Against His Former Team, Xhekaj Gets His First
Montreal finally gave its goaltender a lead at 8:37 of the second period. Mike Matheson and Alexandre Texier set up Zachary Bolduc, who slapped a one-timer from the right circle past Binnington for his fifth goal of the season. The goal counted at even strength, scored seconds after a Montreal power play expired, and it carried a personal edge: it was Bolduc’s first goal against his former team.
St. Louis drafted Bolduc in the first round in 2021, and he scored 19 goals for the Blues in the 2024-25 season before being traded to Montreal for defenceman Logan Mailloux. He had 12 goals and 30 points in 78 games for the Canadiens last season. Scoring the winner in his old building, on a night when his goaltender needed exactly one goal for most of the evening, is the kind of return game a traded player circles.
I just had a lot of belief in this group that if I can just give our team a chance, we have a lot of skill in this team and we can put a few goals in the net.
That was Fowler on Sunday, after his 33-save win over Winnipeg in the Heritage Classic, explaining the approach he brings to this run, in comments reported by NHL.com. Two nights later in St. Louis he gave his team more than a chance. He gave them the game.
The insurance arrived early in the third. At 2:17, Florian Xhekaj redirected a Matheson shot for the first goal of his NHL career, in his ninth game, with Kirby Dach drawing the second assist. Matheson finished with two assists, one on each Montreal goal, and the 2-0 lead he helped build was the margin Fowler protected through the 24-save third period that followed.
Six Straight Wins For The Rookie Netminder
The shutout was Fowler’s second of the season and the third in 24 career starts. He arrived in St. Louis at 5-1-0 with a 1.79 goals-against average, riding five straight wins, and the league had already noticed: on Monday the NHL named Fowler its Third Star of the week, behind Leon Draisaitl and Calgary’s Devin Cooley. After Tuesday, the streak is six straight wins, his season save percentage sits at .940 across seven appearances, and Montreal is 6-1-0 in his starts this season against 1-2-2 in everyone else’s.
The week he is putting together has range. On Sunday in Winnipeg he became the youngest goaltender in NHL history to start an outdoor game, at 21 years and 335 days, and beat the Jets 2-1 at the Heritage Classic. On Tuesday he posted the highest save total of his career in a shutout, on the road, against a Blues team that had already been blanked 4-0 by Carolina on Saturday and played like a group determined not to be shut out twice in a row.
For Montreal, the result moves the club to 7-3-2, with a 4-1-1 road record and three straight wins away from home to open a four-game road trip at 3-0. For St. Louis, the loss drops the Blues to 5-6-1 and marks a second straight game without a goal, a frustrating outcome on a night when they won the shot count 46-20, won 59.3 percent of the faceoffs and still had nothing to show for it.
Montreal finishes the road trip on Thursday in Dallas, where a fourth straight road win is available if this run holds. St. Louis hosts the Boston Bruins on Thursday, still looking for its first goal since Saturday. However the rest of the week goes, Tuesday in St. Louis now belongs to the rookie: 46 shots, 46 saves, and a shutout that turned a game his team was outplayed in for long stretches into two points.
