Sabres goalie Ryan Miller makes a save on Montreal's Saku Koivu during the shootout. (Don Heupel/Associated Press)

Ryan Miller and the Buffalo Sabres have a message for 15 National Hockey League general managers: park your season predictions.

Miller stopped Robert Lang and Saku Koivu in the shootout while teammates Ales Kotalik and Drew Stafford beat Montreal's Carey Price for a 2-1 Sabres home win Friday in the season opener for both clubs.

Kotalik and Stafford fooled Price, deking left and lifting a backhander under the crossbar.

The Sabres began easing the memories of the dreadful collapses and 14-18 record in one-goal games that contributed to costing the team a playoff berth last year.

"It's a good step and a good statement for us," Kotalik said. "If we won more of the shootouts last year than we did, we might have found ourselves in the playoffs."

Miller came up huge late in regulation, stopping Roman Hamrlik, Alex Kovalev and Andrei Markov in the final 60 seconds for his 11th career win over the Canadiens.

Buffalo snapped a three-game losing streak against its Northeast rival and avenged an overtime loss on March 28 to Montreal, which eliminated the Sabres from playoff contention on April 3.

Earlier this week, 15 of 28 league GMs who responded to a poll by cable sports network TSN picked Montreal to represent the Eastern Conference in this year's Stanley Cup.

But for most of Friday's contest, the Canadiens didn't resemble the team that led the conference with 104 points last season. Buffalo took away their speed game while the penalty-kill unit went 4-for-4.

That's quite an improvement from a year ago when Montreal converted eight of 28 manpower advantages in eight games against the Sabres for a 28.6 per cent success rate.

And so much for the Canadiens opening their centennial season with a victory.

"Anniversary or not, every season you try to get off to a good start," said Lang, who was making his regular-season debut with Montreal following a September trade from Chicago. "Good starts come in handy around Christmas and at the end of the year. You never know when you'll need them."

When Montreal did have a decent scoring chance, Miller was usually there to shut the door.

Canadiens head coach Guy Carbonneau wasn't too upset.

"We lost in a shootout. I can't say I'm unhappy about the game," he said.

Carbonneau also wasn't upset after Montreal had a goal waved off with 4:40 remaining, when Markov banked his point shot off the right post following a faceoff deep in the Sabres' end. Referee Ian Walsh disallowed the goal by calling an interference penalty on Canadiens forward Guillaume Latendresse, who upended a Buffalo player attempting to race out to the point.

"It was a penalty," he said. "There's nothing to say about it."

Lang was the lone Canadien to find the back of the net on his team's first shot of the game.

Alone in front of the Buffalo net early in the first period, he spun around and lifted a shot under the crossbar for his eighth goal in 29 career games versus the Sabres.

Both squads tightened up

Buffalo's Thomas Vanek evened the score at 7:40 of the period. After skating past a fallen Mike Komisarek at the Montreal blue-line, he waited for another Canadiens defenceman to slide out of the play before sweeping the puck along the ice past Price.

From there, both squads tightened up defensively and let the netminders put on a clinic.

Price, who kicked out 35 of 36 shots in regulation and overtime, had no less than five top-notch saves in the opening 20 minutes to keep his team in the game.

In the second period, he denied Daniel Paille on a short-handed 2-on-1 rush with Derek Roy.

Sabres defenceman Toni Lydman made a huge save when he pulled the puck off the goal line midway through the frame.

The best of Miller's 19 saves in regulation came with 7:30 remaining in the third when he stuck out his right pad to rob Kovalev, who also had a shot kicked out by the Buffalo goalie with 15 seconds left on the clock.

Not all the news was good. Sabres head coach Lindy Ruff revealed that centre Tim Connolly is out indefinitely after test showed he has a hairline fracture of a vertebra.

Montreal, which continues its season-opening three-game road trip at Toronto on Saturday (7 p.m. ET, CBC, CBCSports.ca) was without left-winger Christopher Higgins (groin) and defenceman Francis Bouillon (knee).

With files from the Associated Press