In St Paul, Jacob Markstrom made 32 saves to help the Calgary Flames take a 5-1 win over the Minnesota Wild on Tuesday night.
The win completed a sweep of a home-and-home set between the clubs.
“A good competitive game there,” Calgary’s Andrew Mangiapane said. “… We were digging in the corner for a while. … Good to get that one. A good solid effort by our whole team there.”
The Flames improved to 32-14-6.
Marcus Foligno was the lone striker for the Wild.
“When you go through things like this, I think it’s not always easy to get out of it, and you’re going to get slapped in the mouth before moving on,” Foligno said. “So yeah, you can preach all you want. We were way better than we were in Calgary, but we still got to be better, so we understand that.
“Thirty-some games we’ve been great. And we have to understand that this is gut check time. This is where moving into playoff spots matters, and everyone’s got to just bring their working boots.”
The Wild dropped to 31-17-3.
“You can’t go in the room and go, ‘Guys, please score,'” Wild coach Dean Evason said. “No, you need to compete, you need to compete your butts off and get chances and they’ll start going in.
“We did everything but score. … Our power play [stunk], and our goalscoring [stunk]. Everything else was great. Our physicality was great, our commitment was great, our chances, we outchanced them. Everything was great but we didn’t score goals. We’ve taken a step in the right direction, we believe. We’re still [angry] that we didn’t win, but we took a step in the right direction, but not backwards tonight.”
The Flames got rolling early with a power play strike from Matthew Tkachuk.
“Scored that power-play goal early and it was really important to get the lead,” Flames coach Darryl Sutter said. “This building’s a really hard building to play in and we came out hard, bang guys around, so it was really important to score that first goal on the power play.”
Mangiapane and Elias Lindholm scored around Foligno’s goal for a 3-1 lead for Calgary.
“We were ready, and we were hungry to get a win here,” Lindholm said. “We were prepared, had a good morning skate. … Had some momentum goals there. … Overall, a solid game.”
Tyler Toffoli scored in the third period for a 4-1 lead, and Mikael Backlund added an empty-net goal for the 5-1 final.
Cam Talbot made 22 saves in the Minnesota loss.
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