Who wins Game 7 tonight, the Sabres or Canadiens? Yes, obviously, and here's why

We’ve got a winner-take-all showdown tonight in Buffalo, as the most entertaining series of the second round concludes with a Game 7 that’s felt inevitable all along. The eyes of the hockey world will be focused on the KeyBank Center tonight, as fans feel the weight of suspense over who’ll win.

But they shouldn’t be. Because it’s pretty obvious.

I mean, the hockey gods aren’t even really trying to disguise the ending here. If you’ve been paying attention to this series, you know who’s going to win.

We’ll lay that case out today, although you should probably skip this post if you prefer to avoid spoilers. I’ll give you five reasons why the winner is so obvious, and by the end you may not even want to bother watching the game.

One small point of order: Because of our commitment to covering both sides of every story, it wouldn’t be fair to only list reasons for one team. So we’ll do both, if only out of an abundance of journalistic ethics. But it goes without saying that I only mean it for one team, and it should be obvious which one that is. (If you’re not sure, check with me after the game is over and I’ll be happy to tell you which side I was really on all along.)

Five reasons why the Habs are definitely winning tonight. And five more for the Sabres. The right answer is definitely in here somewhere.

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Building each team's best lineup of players who never won a Cup with them

It’s Friday, the second round is almost over, and there’s no hockey tonight. Let’s keep it simple with a time-killing roster game.

This one comes up surprisingly often from readers: Which team could build the best all-time lineup of players who never won a Cup for them?

Easy. Maybe a little too easy, since some teams are going to be a lot tougher than others. So today, we’ll tackle this question in three parts, nudging of the difficulty as we go.

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A brief history of the Maruk Trophy, a fake award for the MVP of early eliminations

Has a player from your favorite team ever won the Conn Smythe?

Probably not, because your team never wins anything, and the Conn Smythe is very much an award for winners. Even in those rare years where it goes to a player from the team that loses in the final, like Connor McDavid a few seasons ago, you’re still talking about somebody from a team that’s won three rounds. That’s a lot of winning. And since the Conn Smythe is the only playoff-specific award the NHL has, that means anyone whose team doesn’t win goes home empty-handed.

Until today. We’re adding a new award to our fake trophy case.

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All 12 Stanley Cup finals matchups left in play, ranked purely on narratives

You know what they say: When it comes to a hockey playoff series, all that matters is what happens on the ice. You wave away the distractions and noise and just focus on the games being played.

That’s what they say, because they are fools. It’s the playoffs. It’s all about the narrative, baby.

OK, I’ll acknowledge the slight possibility that my media background is shining through here, and not everyone cares about pre-built storylines quite as much as I’ve been trained to. But it’s my column, so today we’re doing narratives.

Specifically, we’re looking ahead to the various possible matchups we could see in the final. With the Flyers out, we’re down to 12 possible combinations of teams, and please don’t ask me long it took to figure that math out on my own without asking Dom.

Let’s look ahead to what June could bring, ranked from the least to the most enticing, based purely on the narratives that people like me will beat into the ground.

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NHL draft lottery hindsight fun: The games that we now know changed the outcome

The NHL draft lottery was this week, and the results were met with unanimous praise and approval. But what if things had been different?

Specifically, what if one game, or even one moment, from the 2025-26 season had played out just slightly differently? As it turns out, that can change everything. Because of the way the process works, and how the league hands out combinations to specific spots in the standings, any result that shifted those standings would also have ended up changing the lottery outcomes.

That’s the theory, at least. And it’s one we’ve had some fun with over the years, like the time that Patrik Stefan’s infamous open-net blooper ended up sending Patrick Kane to Chicago instead of Edmonton. Last year, we discovered that a random Sabres/Islanders game nobody even remembered ended up sending Matthew Schaefer to New York instead of Buffalo. That might turn out to be important someday.

We can’t do this every year, because sometimes the gaps between teams are wide enough that there’s no single game that works. For example, if the Canucks had won the lottery this year, we wouldn’t have been able to find a game that swung the (checks notes) 14-point gap between them and the next team.

But as you may have heard, the Canucks did not win the lottery. Instead, the lucky numbers belonged to the 28th-place Maple Leafs and the 24th-place Sharks. Bad news for Vancouver, but good news for us in the hindsight business, because it gives us plenty to work with.

As always, if you’re the sort of person who’s going to be bothered by the premise here, and think you might feel tempted to wade into the comments section and rant about butterfly effects and the concept of rational determinism, kindly go be a wet blanket somewhere else. For the rest of us, let’s find some moments that changed history.

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