NHL Update: Minnesota Wild edge past Edmonton Oilers, 4-1
Pierre-Marc Bouchard scored a goal and assisted twice and Minnesota Wild used a three-goal burst in the final frame to take down Edmonton Oilers, 4-1, at Xcel Energy Centre on Tuesday night.
Martin Havlat and Jared Spurgeon both also lit the lamp for Minnesota, which has won 15 consecutive contests against Oilers in Minnesota and had lost three of 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 Oilers, who had a three-game winning streak snapped and has dropped 11 of their previous 14 play-offs on the road. Nikolai Khabibulin turned away 19 shots in the loss.
“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,” Edmonton head coach Tom Renney said. “It always looks pretty when you get to look at highlights and see nice tuck-in
goals or whatever, 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 9 ½ minutes into the middle period. He got behind the defence and ripped a wrist shot between Khabibulin’s pads.
Foster knotted it at 1-1 with nearly 2 ½ minutes left in the same period. The goal came when he jumped up 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 just 1 ½ minute into the final session, as he received a pass from Nick Schultz in the slot and swiped a backhander just under the crossbar.
“We weren’t our best for the first two periods,” Brodziak said. “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, 3-1, five minutes later with a slap shot from the right circle, then after killing off a 5-on-3 rush, Bouchard accounted for the final scoring, 4-1, with a highlight reel goal.
The goal came when Bouchard took a long pass from Cal Clutterbuck at the Edmonton blue line. Then he moved in on a breakaway, slowed down and put a backhander home with 5 ½ minutes left in the game.
"From the blue line I saw one of their defenseman fall down, so I knew I had time to make that move," Bouchard said. "I'm pretty glad it worked."
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