The three-game sweep of the NHL starts in Ottawa where an afternoon contest had the New York Rangers visiting the Senators.
The Sens’ Craig Anderson (33 saves) and New York’s Henrik Lundqvist (22 saves) traded efforts throughout regulation and into the 3-on-3 overtime with the score knotted at one all.
Chris Kreider scored for the Rangers and Erik Karlsson tied it for the Sens shortly after; for each it was their third goal of the season.
Dan Boyle was given an opportunity to win it for the Rangers in the shootout and he wristed a shot past Anderson for the win.
“There’s not too many more times I might be playing here, so it was nice to have some people in the crowd and give them a little reward,” Boyle said. “More importantly, I think, reward the team and the coach for working hard and playing hard tonight and getting the two [points] and not leaving a point out there.”
Boyle has 11 shootout goals in his career.
“We’ve used Dan a couple of times before and he’s always had some pretty good moves,” Vigneault said. “Shootouts. Who knows? You throw guys over the boards and it worked out for us tonight.”
In Montreal, the Colorado Avalanche got a big effort from Nathan MacKinnon, Mikhail Grigorenko and Matt Duchene who combined for nine points in a 6-1 drubbing of the Canadiens.
“I don’t think we’re in the elite conversation of the League yet,” MacKinnon said. “We’re working, we want to earn that, but whether they had a good night or not, we played very well. We stuck to our system and Reto played great for us, so we’re happy with the win.”
The Avs took a 3-0 lead in the first despite being outplayed and outshot, 18-8, in the first.
Reto Berra made 39 saves for the win.
“[Berra] was phenomenal. He was very, very good,” Avalanche coach Patrick Roy said. “It’s funny how it goes sometimes because the Canadiens dominated the first period and it was 3-0 for us. That doesn’t happen often, but you take it when it happens. I felt we played better in the second. Even though we only had three shots, I thought we defended better than we did in the first.”
MacKinnon had two of the first period goals, within 13 seconds of each other.
“It’s always fun to score,” MacKinnon said. “It put a pretty commanding lead on the game at the end of the first and I think that took a lot of energy out of them. They made it 3-1, and then we scored shorthanded, 4-1, so it was a top-to-bottom effort and it definitely feels very good.”
Brendan Gallagher had the Habs’ lone goal.
“Anybody can beat anybody on any night,” the Canadiens’ P.K. Subban said. “And if you can’t execute your game plan to a T, especially when teams are coming into our barn knowing where we are in the standings, teams are aggressive, and they were aggressive right from the start.”
Keeping in the region, the San Jose Sharks visited the Buffalo Sabres Saturday and skated off with a tight, 2-1, overtime decision.
Patrick Marleau potted the game-winner.
“It feels good,” Marleau said. “I knew it had been a long time, but I didn’t know it had been that long so it’s definitely nice to switch things going a little bit the other way now. Hopefully we can get 10 in a row now.”
The Sharks improved to 9-8-0 and won their second straight game.
“It’s nice to get two wins, but you’ve got to keep it going because if you lose your next two games, you’re back to where you started,” the Sharks’ Marc-Edouard Vlasic said. “In this league you’ve got to get wins together in order to create separation with the teams behind you. We started out on this road trip and we’ve got to keep it going, but it’s nice to start it off with back-to-back wins in back-to-back games.”
Vlasic had given the Sharks a 1-0 lead in the first on a power play goal.
“We got a power play goal, which we needed,” coach Peter DeBoer said. “Our specialty teams came up big. Guys dug deep for back to back. We were running on fumes a little bit, but our goalie was great and gave us a chance to get to overtime.”
Ryan O’Reilly tied it up in the third with his fifth of the year.
“I just tried to get it on net as hard as I could,” O’Reilly said. “Everything else wasn’t working.”
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