In Calgary, Jacob Markstrom picked up his eighth shutout of the season in a 6-0 win over the visiting Vegas Golden Knights on Tuesday.
He made 28 saves for the win.
“Jacob Markstrom statement game,” Calgary head coach Darryl Sutter said. “It’s really about a 6-5 game.”
The Flames improved to 24-13-6.
Mikael Backlund picked up a goal and four points for the Flames.
“We knew they were going to come,” Vegas’ Brayden McNabb said. “They’re a good team. They start fast. They dominated us from start to finish. They embarrassed us. They deserved to win that one like they did.”
Matthew Tkachuk added a goal and three points to the scoresheet.
“Tonight, our first period really set up our game,” Tkachuk said. “When you’re up 3-0 after one like that, that’s really hard to come back from. We want to make this place a tough place to play. We want to be known as a great first-period team here because when you dominate like we did in the first period, that doesn’t give the other team a ton of confidence.”
Andrew Mangiapane hit for a double for Calgary.
“‘Marky’ kept us in the game, and really kept us in the game in the second period,” Tkachuk said. “We were giving up a lot. Even though it may not looked like it, but ‘Marky’ made some insane saves there. I think at that point it was a little too much run and gun.”
The Golden Knights dropped to 28-17-3.
“No excuse,” Golden Knights head coach Pete DeBoer said. “We know they’re a quick-starting team. We knew they’d be hungry and ready to play and treating this as a really important game. We were prepared for all that. No excuse for how we started the game. The game was essentially over 20 minutes in, unfortunately.”
The Flames scored three in the opening period to take control of the game.
Johnny Gaudreau, Backlund, and Elias Lindholm scored in the first period.
“That was a big win for us,” Backlund said. “It’s important for us to have a good start and we got what we wanted. A little sloppy second period, ‘Marky’ was playing real well for us in the second and held us up 4-0, so that was huge for us going into the third, and I thought we had better jump in the third.”
Robin Lehner made 27 saves in the loss.
“We knew they were waiting for us,” Vegas’ Jonathan Marchessault said. “They’ve been waiting for that game for a while and we came off just flat. There’s no excuse for our group. We’re a veteran group and we know how to handle those situations, and we definitely didn’t do it tonight.”
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