In Nashville, Ryan Johansen scored his first career NHL hat trick to lead the Predators to a 6-2 win over the Minnesota Wild on Tuesday night. 
“Yeah, awesome to get it in a big game, and at home here, too,” Johansen said. “It was really cool. It’s been a long time, so it was nice to get it.”
Nashville improved to 40-25-4.
Mats Zuccarello and Kirill Kaprizov e were the Wild strikers.
“It was a hard hockey game, competitive,” Minnesota’s Marcus Foligno said. “You take the penalty kills out of the situation, we were a better hockey team, I believe. It’s a tough one, but I’m proud of our group, the way we pushed back.”
Nashville pushed past the Vegas Golden Knights for the second wild card spot.
“It was a man’s game,” Nashville coach John Hynes said. “There wasn’t a lot of time and space. … Special teams were key. But this game wasn’t for the faint of heart … That’s the edge our team plays with.”
Roman Josi had and Matt Duchene had single markers for the Predators.
“We thrive on hard, fast, competitive hockey,” Duchene said. “We thrive on it, meaningful hockey. We’re a team that, earlier in the year, some of the top teams were beating us. We addressed it, talked about it. Since then, it’s been the ability to get our game up to the top level. That’s us in a nutshell tonight.”
The Wild dropped to 43-21-5.
“We have to find a way to stay the [heck] out of the box because, obviously, they’ve got special players and special power-play players and they hurt us,” Minnesota coach Dean Evason said. “Our 5-on-5 game is great. [Saros] is fantastic, a fantastic goaltender. They blocked a lot of shots. I don’t know how many attempts we had at the net. We did a lot of good things. We’re going to take some serious positivity out of this game, but disappointed.”
Philip Tomasino also scored for Nashville.
Marc-Andre Fleury made 27 saves in the Minnesota loss.
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