In Winnipeg, Kyle Connor scored at 3:31 of extra time on Thursday night to send the Jets to a 2-1 win over the Nashville Predators.
“[Connor’s] got one of the best releases in the League, so just keep shooting, man,” Winnipeg coach Rick Bowness said. “He had some great looks tonight. Give their goalie a lot of credit ’cause he made a lot of very big and timely saves for them.”
For Nashville it was their fifth straight loss.
“Obviously, it’s disappointing we didn’t get the two points for [Saros] with the way he played tonight,” Nashville forward Mikael Granlund said. “Like we saw tonight, he gave us the chance to win the hockey game [with] the saves he made.”
Connor Hellebuyck made 25 saves in the Jets win.
Winnipeg improved to 19-9-1.
“You just say, ‘Stay with it. We’re doing a lot of great things,'” Bowness said. “The players know they’re getting all of these Grade-A’s and getting good shots and getting good looks. Just stay with it. Don’t get frustrated. Just keep doing what we’re doing. It’s working.”
Nashville took a 1-0 lead at 9:04 of the fist period on a strike from Filip Forsberg.
“It was a great play by [Duchene] carrying the line, protecting the puck, over to [Granlund] and ‘Granny’ just kind of relayed it over,” Forsberg said. “I tried to shoot it quick and it went in, so it was a good play by ‘Dutchy’ and Granny.”
The Preds dropped to 12-12-4.
Winnipeg tied the game, 1-1, on a goal from Dylan DeMelo at 12:54 of the first.
“After our last few games, that was a pretty strong effort,” DeMelo said. “We did a really good job, did a lot of good things that when you roll the video back, I don’t think we’d be losing too much sleep over it if we didn’t get the [overtime] point. Luckily, we’ve got [Connor] on our team and we finished the job.”
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Juuse Saros made 39 saves in the Predators loss.
“I think we did a really a good job of establishing our forecheck and did a good job recovering pucks and holding on to them,” DeMelo said. “We got our [defensemen] involved and got a lot of motion, and that opened up some lanes for us and some seams. Saros made some really big saves and kept them in it. Probably won them a point, but we stayed with it. … Just great for our group to stay with it and win a close game like that.”
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