Minnesota Wild beat Edmonton Oilers 4-1
Pierre-Marc Bouchard scored a goal and assisted twice, as the Minnesota Wild used a three-goal burst in the final frame to thrash the Edmonton Oilers 4-1, at Xcel Energy Centre on Tuesday night.
Martin Havlat and Jared Spurgeon both also lit the lamp for Minnesota, who have won 15 consecutive contests against the Oilers in Minnesota, but had lost three of their last four coming into the game. Kyle Brodziak also notched a goal, while Niklas Backstrom
stopped 20-of-21 shots to earn the win.
Kurtis Foster was the lone scorer for the Oilers, who had a three-game winning streak snapped, and dropped 11 of their previous 14 play-offs on the road. Nikolai Khabibulin turned away 19 shots in the loss.
Edmonton Head Coach Tom Renney lamented the fact that his players didn't do enough in the game. He said, “When you got a 5-on-3, you want to make sure you get traffic at the net so you at least feel like it’s a good idea to shoot. ... but the bottom line
is you got to get greasy, you got to get dirty, you got to get the puck to the net with bodies.”
After a goalless opening stanza, Havlat opened the scoring to give Minnesota a 1-0 lead just nine and a half minutes into the middle period. He got behind the defence and ripped a wrist shot between Khabibulin’s pads.
Foster then tied the game at 1-1 with nearly two and a half minutes left in the same period. The goal came when he jumped on a 3-on-2 rush and fired a wrist shot to beat Backstrom on the glove side. Brodziak put Minnesota ahead by 2-1 lead early in the final
session, as he received a pass from Nick Schultz in the slot and swiped a backhander just under the crossbar.
An excited Brodziak told reporters, “We weren’t our best for the first two periods. There were a lot of execution things we weren’t happy with. We were turning the puck over a lot. We knew, just talking it over with everyone, we had another level to get
to. We definitely took it there in the third.”
Spurgeon doubled the advantage at 3-1 five minutes later with a slap shot from the right circle. Then after killing off a 5-on-3 rush, Bouchard rounded off the final scoring at 4-1, with a highlight reel goal. The goal came when Bouchard took a long pass
from Cal Clutterbuck at the Edmonton blue line. He moved in on a breakaway, slowed down and put a backhander home with five and a half minutes left in the game.
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