In Sunrise, the Chicago Blackhawks’ Corey Crawford made 38 saves through extra time and two additional saves in the penalties phase of the game in a3-2 win over the Florida Panthers on Saturday.
“I don’t know, we’ve still got a chance here,” Crawford said. “I say it a lot, but we’ve just got to go game by game and not worry about the end result and just keep that effort. Guys are working hard and playing good defense. We’ve just got to keep going with that.”
The Blackhawks are just six points back of the second wild card in the Western Conference, but it’s crowded up there.
Mike Hoffman scored for the Panthers and Mike Matheson knotted the game late in the third period to force extra time.
“We’re looking ahead to March, it’s do or die,” Matheson said. “A lot of people have written us off already, but that just adds fuel to our fire.”
Drake Caggiula and Jonathan Toews scored for the Hawks in regulation.
“Would have loved to close it out in regulation, that would have been easier on everyone,” Blackhawks coach Jeremy Colliton said. “I like the start. I thought we played pretty well, didn’t give up much. The second period, actually the last two periods, [I] would have loved for us to generate a little more zone time, put more pressure on them and take the pressure off us. But I thought the third period, we were pretty good until obviously they scored (the tying goal), but credit to our guys, they came through. [Crawford] made a lot of big saves for us and we had some big-time players come through in the shootout.”
Toews scored on penalties.
[WATCH: All Blackhawks vs. Panthers highlights]
Sergei Bobrovsky made 27 saves in the loss.
“It was a tough post-All-Star break for us,” Panthers head coach Joel Quenneville said. “We’ve got to recapture that feeling of what it was like prior to going into this. We had a lot of things going the right way. We were a little quicker and we had the puck more.”
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