Behind 37 saves from John Gibson, the Anaheim Ducks reached 90 points on the season in a 3-1 drubbing of the Montreal Canadiens Wednesday night.
The Ducks got goals from Francois Beauchemin, Rickard Rakell and Cam Fowler to support Gibson’s heroics in net.
“That’s huge — every time you have a goalie playing every night that gives you a chance to win,” Beauchemin said. “If it wasn’t for [Gibson] tonight, I don’t think we would have won that game. He kept us in it. He made some big saves, some breakaway saves. We’re fortunate to have two big goaltenders that can do that.”
Gibson faced 27 shots through the first forty minutes of play and was perfect on all including several highlight saves on the Habs’ against Tomas Plekanec Max Pacioretty (shorthanded breakaway) Andrei Markov.
“I’m just trying to build off the team,” Gibson said. “Obviously we have a nice streak, and I’m just trying to getting better each and every night.
“I had a tough stretch in the beginning, but I think, throughout your career, it happens to everybody, so hopefully mine’s out of the way now and [I need to] just keep staying healthy and keep playing hockey.”
Alex Galchenyuk picked up the lone goal for Montreal.
“I don’t think we’re losing momentum,” Canadiens defenseman P.K. Subban said. “[Overall], you can just focus on the process, you can’t focus on anything else. You try to focus on the process, and hopefully it’s in your favor. In this case, we’ve done enough to win hockey games, win this hockey game. It just didn’t bounce our way today.”
Montreal has lost the first two games of their road trip by an aggregate of 7-1.
“I liked the way we played,” Habs coach Michel Therrien said. “We competed hard. This is an elite team. I liked the way we pushed the pace. We put a lot of pucks at the net. We had some quality scoring chances tonight and the difference tonight was their goalie. He was phenomenal.”
Carey Price made 30 saves in the loss.
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