In Denver, the Vancouver Canucks’ Ethan Bear scored with eight minutes left in regulation on Wednesday night, to snap a 3-3 tie and send the Canucks to a 4-3 win over the Avalanche.
Trailing 3-2 entering the third period, Sheldon Dries tied the 3-3, too set up Bear’s heroics.
“[Dries] gets on the wall, [Oliver Ekman-Larsson] gets it, and then I just get over and I just get a shot on net,” Bear said. “Sometimes when you shoot, good things happen.”
Spencer Martin made 33 saves in the Canucks win.
“We never quit. We took a lot of penalties against a great power play, and even when we got down, we never quit,” Canucks coach Bruce Boudreau said. “Tonight, we were pretty determined to do that, and that’s a great sign of a team. It’s a great sign of a lot of players that they never quit, and they want to keep going.”
Vancouver improved to 7-10-3.
Mikko Rantanen hit for a double for Colorado.
“I didn’t love our game tonight. I didn’t think we checked hard enough in the first period. It’s a dangerous team.” Colorado coach Jared Bednar said. “There’s some things obviously that I didn’t love. It wasn’t terrible at all times, but it wasn’t to our standard tonight.”
Vancouver took a 1-0 lead on 21 seconds of fresh in the game when Ilya Mikheyev hit for a marker.
“It gives you that extra confidence. Sometimes you get that lucky bounce and it goes in, and you just want to keep your foot on the gas and try to get another one,” Bear said. “It’s obviously a booster, but when you score one, there’s still sixty minutes to play. You got to keep going, right?”
Rantanen tied it with his first of the night.
“The positives out of the game is special teams were really good again,” Bednar said. “Penalty kill’s been rolling. They had some good looks tonight, no question, but they’re keeping it out of the net. Power play clicks again, had some dangerous looks, made their goalie look good on a couple of them, but he scrambled and did a nice job making some saves as well.”
Rantanen’s second came off the power in the first period to send the game to the middle frame with the Avs up, 2-1.
Bo Horvat tied the game, 2-2, for the Canucks midway through the second period.
The Avalanche dropped to 11-6-1.
Cale Makar hit off the power play to send the game to the third period with the Avs leading 3-2.
“Hopefully next time we get a good match with minimal special teams. A lot of it tonight was special teams,” Makar said. “Two power plays that are doing well, and two PKs that are somewhat doing well, as well. It’s tough to see them score on 4-on-4, but it could’ve been the complete opposite.”
Dries tied it in the third to set up Bear’s winner.
“It was just a bouncing puck,” Dries said, “A little stick lift, hit ‘Frankie’s’ pad, and then the rebound was sitting right there. Just try to get it elevated as fast as I can.”
Pavel Francouz made 22 saves in the Avs loss.
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