In Raleigh, the New York Islanders stunned the Hurricanes out of the gate on Tuesday night, and took a 3-2 win in Game 5.
Pierre Engvall scored in the opening stanza, and Brock Nelson scored in the middle frame to give the Isles a 2-0 lead in the game.
“I think you’ve seen this from this group a lot this year. It’s a resilient group,” Islanders captain Anders Lee said. “You know, our road just to get in wasn’t that easy, we had to pull ourselves out of a hole after some tough stretches, but we believe in one another, we believe in this group and what we can do and how we can play. And that was no different coming into this evening.”
The win kept the Islanders in the series, they now trail the Canes, 3-2, headed home for Game 6.
“[Engvall] protects the puck and makes a lot of nice little plays,” Nelson said. “Tonight he did a pretty good job hounding it, finding himself in good spots, and generating chances by himself with his speed.”
Ilya Sorokin made 34 saves in the win.
“They come out hard in this building,” New York coach Lane Lambert said. “We knew they were going to come out hard. We knew [Sorokin would] have to make a few saves, and he did.
“There was no, for lack of a better term, panic in our game. We just made sure that we stuck to our plan. We knew we’d need a couple of saves going home, but certainly we did that. We just played pretty steady and pretty solid and we battled.”
Paul Stastny scored in the the 14th minute of the middle frame to trim the deficit to 2-1 for the Hurricanes.
“I like the way we played. We played hard,” Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “We had a couple mistakes that cost us, but there wasn’t a ton of those. It was just the bounces didn’t go our way.”
Mathew Barzal scored with less than two minutes left in the second for a 3-1 lead to the Isles.
“Bo was a one-timer. Any time you can get a guy with his goal-scoring ability the puck in that situation, it’s a good chance,” Barzal said. “But I thought Burns did a good job of taking the pass away, so it forced me to shoot, and I just picked a spot.”
Sebastian Aho scored midway through the third period to get the Canes back within one, but Carolina was unable to close the gap.
“It’s supposed to be hard this time of year,” Aho said. “We were ready for a long series. It’s no big deal. Obviously, just go back to Long Island and try to do it another night there.”
Antti Raanta made 19 saves.
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