In Nashville, Frederik Andersen made 38 saves to help the Carolina Hurricanes to a 3-2 win over the Predators on Saturday night.
“I just tried to continue my process of focusing on the next shot,” Andersen said. “You can’t really focus on too much else. They have a bigger team. You just want to stay in the fight and do the next shift. That’s what the players do. As goalies, it’s the next shot. Like I said before, I think we stayed in the fight and got another two points.”
Jesper Fast opened the scoring for the Canes with a goal for a 1-0 lead in the opening frame.
“[Goaltending] was the difference, obviously,” Carolina head coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “I haven’t seen a lot of games like that in the three years that I’ve been doing this, where clearly the goaltender was the reason we won the game or we needed him too. It’s usually the goalies are playing good, but we’re playing well. We didn’t play a very good game in front of him, but he came up huge.”
Ryan Johansen knotted the game at 1-1 in the second period for Nashville.
“I thought we played pretty well,” Nashville head coach John Hynes said. “I thought in the first period we were under duress a little bit, and really it was self-inflicted by us. Just our execution coming out, I thought we were rimming pucks too much along the wall and we didn’t play with enough poise in our own zone.
“But I thought we did a good job in the second and third. I think when you look at the style of game that we want to play and being able to put them under duress and give ourselves a chance, I think there’s lots to build on.”
Carolina’s Andrei Svechnikov scored the game-winner with six minutes left in the game.
“[Andersen] played awesome,” Svechnikov said. “I don’t know how many shots they had. I thought they had like 50 or 60 shots today, and he made big saves. I was glad to see that we won today and to help him as well.”
Teuvo Teravainen scored into an empty net with 72 seconds left on the clock in the third period.
Filip Forsberg scored for the Predators with 45 seconds left in regulation to close within one f the Canes.
“We did a lot of things better tonight,” Johansen said. “There’s so many positives. It just [stinks] that the fact of the matter is we’re 0-2 and have got to find ways to win hockey games. It’s hard to win hockey games in this league. So it’s too bad. We worked our [backsides] off. They made a big play there at the end. It was a great hockey game.”
Juuse Saros made 29 saves in the loss.
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