In St Paul, the Calgary Flamers’ Mark Giordano forced extra time with the Wild on Sunday night with his first goal in forever.
The extra session solved nothing and the teams needed a seven-round skills competition to settle affair.
Dillon Dube potted the deciding goal in the seventh round for a 5-4 Flames win.
“It wasn’t our best game by any means. I think we were grinding a bit there,” Giordano said. “We were committed to winning and we had guys that battled when we needed to to get the extra point.”
David Rittich made 30 saves for the win.
“It was a crazy game for a goalie,” Rittich said. “You know, we didn’t get lead and when we scored, they scored right away. They had Grade A chances, so it was kind of hard to stick with it. I mean, it was a good game by our team because we weren’t out the whole time and we stick with it.”
Marcus Foligno scored twice for the Wild, and Kevin Fiala and Jordan Greenway added single markers.
“We have to think about a game like this and let it motivate us,” Greenway said. “We should be ready to go after them next game and once we get the lead, keep the lead and keep going for it. We did a lot of good things. A lot of guys were going really well tonight up and down the lineup. If we continue to play like that and keep pushing, we’ll do a lot of good things.”
Milan Lucic, Travis Hamonic and Michael Stone also scored for the Flames.
“At the end of the day, we really have to look at this as a stepping stone for us and an important lesson,” Flames coach Geoff Ward said. “We can be happy that we got the win, but we sure can’t be satisfied. There’s much more there. We need to continue to get better daily so that we become a lot more confident managing games.
“When you’re learning how to win, and we talk about how important that is for our group coming off last season and into this one, that’s an important process for us and it’s something that we have to continually talk about.”
[WATCH: All Flames vs. Wild highlights]
Alex Stalock made 33 saves in the loss.
“For the most part, it was a good game by us,” Foligno said. “But I think we may have gotten into a little bit of a run-and-gun with them and we kind of got on our heels in the last little bit in the third. They really had not much to lose; they obviously got lifted by the power-play goal.”
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