On a night when the Flames needed home ice to pay dividends, Filip Gustavsson made 31 saves in a 3-0 shutout for the visiting Minnesota Wild on Saturday night.
“He’s been awesome,” Minnesota forward Matt Boldy said. “Nothing but good things to say. He’s been standing on top of his head and making saves when he has to, saves he should make and saves he shouldn’t make. He’s making it easy for us.”
The Flames dropped to 27-23-13.
“I think it was kind of flat on our end from start to finish,” Calgary forward Milan Lucic said. “At this point of the year, especially, you should be excited and have a lot of energy to play every single night. That’s on us as individuals and that’s on us as a team. As players, it’s a big part of our preparation. Energy is something we have to create within.”
The Wild took a 1-0 lead at 14:52 of the first on a strike by Joel Eriksson Ek .
“It’s important,” Eriksson Ek said. “It’s a really important time of year. For us, these games are real big. It’s a tight race and we know that. Hopefully we can keep building on this.”
The score stayed that way until the third period when Marcus Foligno extended the advantage to 2-0 for Minnesota.
“The goals today aren’t pretty goals, especially not the second one,” Gustavsson said. “We had a lot of traffic and we hit a bounce, it hits the back of the net and jumps forward. I don’t know if I’ve seen that before. If we keep crashing the net, we’re going to have some ugly goals and then we can have some nice goals also.”
Boldy iced the win, 3-1, at 16:30 with a goal.
“We had a little bit of a struggle right before this streak, and now it feels like we find the defensive play and we win with one goal, usually,” Gustavsson said. “It’s just very positive in here and everyone is comfortable with playing those tight games, and we’ve had success with it.”
Jacob Markstrom made 30 saves in the Calgary loss.
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