In Dallas, Anton Khudobin made 20 saves for the stars in a 4-1 win over the Florida Panthers on Saturday afternoon.
“We needed it,” Stars head coach Rick Bowness said. “That’s a very good hockey club over there, obviously fighting for first place in the division and we finally got to their goalie. We needed a team effort, we needed everyone to contribute. We got a big goal from the fourth line, big goal obviously on the power play as well and [Robertson] with a couple of big goals. We needed the balance and we needed a good team effort today and we got it.”
Aleksander Barkov was the lone goal scorer for the Panthers.
“The last couple of games we haven’t been playing exactly the way we want to play,” Barkov said. “Obviously the teams are playing really well against us. Gotta give credit to them. But it’s up to us. We have to find the way how to win these types of games. These games feel like they’re playoff games, so we’ve got to find a way to win these.”
Florida has lost three straight.
Jason Robertson opened the scoring in the game with the first of his two goals on the afternoon.
The Stars pushed it to 2-0 when Joel L’Esperance scored at 1:29 of the first period.
“That was definitely not starting on time,” Panthers head coach Joel Quenneville said. “Can’t blame it on anything not being ready. It was a huge deficit to try to overcome. … It was one of those games, a garbage can game for me. First one of the year, and let’s move on.”
Jamie Benn extended the lead to 3-0 in the first period.
“Winning’s fun,” Benn said. “It takes a lot of hard work, takes 20 guys that are in the lineup that night. But we just have to find a way to keep going here. A lot of important hockey coming up and we have to find ways to win these games.
Barkov broke through with a goal with less than two seconds left on the clock in the middle frame.
“We’ve talked about big goals at the right time, we got those tonight, and that’s the difference between now and earlier in the year,” Bowness said. “The save wasn’t there when we needed it the most and the goal wasn’t there, which is just as important. To keep moving forward, we need to continue to get both the big save at the right time and the big goal at the right time.”
Robertson picked up his second goal of the game in the period for the 4-1 final.
“I originally thought about dumping the puck but
realized we kind of had a 2-on-2 rush,” Robertson said. “I decided to keep the puck in, Roope [Hintz] drove the middle, opened up a little space, I just got to the middle and just thought about shooting it and luckily it went in.”
Sergei Bobrovsky made 16 saves in the loss.
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