Isak Rosen scored the game-winning goal on a deflection with 9:39 remaining in the third period. Anton Wahlberg and Noah Ostlund – both rookies who joined Rochester during the past month upon the conclusions of their Swedish Hockey Leagues seasons – scored first-period goals.
Levi, another rookie on a team that returned several players who were part of last year’s run to the Eastern Conference Finals, continued his run of excellence in the AHL. The 22-year-old spent the bulk of the second half of the season with Rochester and went 16-6-4 with a .927 save percentage. The latter mark ranked second in the league among qualified goaltenders.
Rosen joked afterward that he’s almost come to expect saves like the one Levi made on Koepke to seal the victory.
“You don’t expect it – but almost right now,” Rosen said. “He does that all the time, so it’s great to have that feeling when your goalie [makes] that kind of save.”
Levi may have been fighting chaos with chaos, but his deliberate mental approach keeps him ready for the moment. His retelling of the play postgame revealed the thought behind the save.
“I just saw [Barre-Boulet] obviously taking that one-timer, that slap shot,” he said. “It hit my pad and I knew right away it was going right in the middle of chaos. So, just tried to lift my leg as fast as possible and push over, just try to take the bottom of the net. The shooter was in tight, so I just tried to get something on it.”
Rochester coach Seth Appert, a former goaltender, chalked the play up as a byproduct of Levi’s competitiveness and athleticism in net. What impressed Appert more was how Levi responded to a goal he had allowed earlier in the game.
The Crunch, trailing 2-0 after 20 minutes, responded with 14 shots during the second period. Levi made 13 saves, but the one goal he allowed – a shot by Dylan Duke that squeezed by Levi from a bad angle beside the net – was one the goaltender admitted he wanted back afterward.
Levi shook it off and only allowed one more goal the rest of the way.
“He was excellent, and the beauty was he gave up a bad goal and it didn’t faze him,” Appert said. “That’s what’s so impressive, being a young rookie goaltender in his first playoff games.
“And the save he made at the end, that’s his competitiveness, that’s his talent. That’s there. You know that’s always there. The composure to not be shook at all after giving up a squeaker is probably more impressive in his first playoff game.”
Levi is intentional about his tendency to move on from a goal allowed. It’s an approach he described during his stint with the Sabres last spring, when he allowed six goals in a game in Detroit but ended the night by stopping all three attempts in his first NHL shootout. He had the same approach on Friday, inviting the next opportunity to make a save as soon as Duke’s shot went past him.
“It’s always going to be pretty,” Levi said. “I didn’t expect to come into this game and into this playoff run with everything going perfectly as planned. Obviously, it’s a goal that, as a goalie, you want back, but that doesn’t change the fact that you still have a whole half a game to play.”
