In Detroit, the Red Wings righted their ship on Saturday on a matinee with the New York Islanders.
Ville Husso made 24 saves and the Red Wings shut out the Isles, 3-0.
“The guys did a great job in front of me today, they made my life easy again,” said Husso. “They do all the big things, and I just have to focus on keeping out any goals.”
Detroit moved to 6-5-2 with the win.
“If you had told me we would be sitting where we are right now with the players we’re missing, I would have told you there’s no way,” Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde said. “It’s about our players and their commitment to their teammates.”
New York dropped to 7-5-.
“Give them credit, they did a good job of taking away time and space, but I didn’t think we played fast enough, and there’s no excuse for that,” Islanders coach Lane Lambert said. “We had 30 shot attempts in the first two periods and finished with 63, 33 in the third period. Clearly, we weren’t doing enough in the first 40 minutes.”
After a scoreless first period, the Red Wings put two on the board in the middle frame.
With a two-skater advantage, Lucas Raymond popped in what would be the game-winner for a 1-0 lead at 6:29.
“I feel like we’ve been getting a lot of looks on the power play every time we’re out there,” Raymond said. “[Kubalik] knows I’m going to be looking for the backdoor pass, and he’s done a great job of finding me.”
The Detroit special teams continued to work, at 12:51, Pius Suter extended the lead to 2-0 with a shorthanded strike.
“We’d had a couple of power plays, so we knew we’d have to spend some time on the PK,” Suter said. “Getting a two-goal lead is huge, and when you do it short-handed, it really takes the momentum away from them.”
Dominik Kubalik scored in the third period for the 3-0 final.
Semyon Varlamov made 22 saves in the Islanders loss.
Varlamov did not ice the final eight plus minutes of the second period. He left the ice after a collision and returned for the third period.
Ilya Sorokin made one save and yielded one goal.
“We’ve got a busy week ahead of us, with games on Monday (Calgary Flames) and Tuesday (New York Rangers), so we have to take the things we liked, look at the things we need to correct, and move on,” Lambert said.
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