The three-game sweep of the NHL from Saturday night stars in Raleigh where the Carolina Hurricanes sent the New Jersey Devils home with a 3-1 loss.
Justin Faulk scored his first even strength goal of the season, his 13th of the year, to lead the Canes.
“He was due to get an even-strength goal,” coach Bill Peters said online. “He’s had lots of opportunities.”
Brett Pesce and Joakim Nordstrom also scored for the Canes.
“Everyone was hungry,” Nordstrom said. “We really wanted to come back and play well off the Christmas break.”
Kyle Palmieri scored the Devils’ lone goal in the third.
“We’ve got through things all year long where things happen to come up,” coach John Hynes said, according to Northjersey.com. “This is one of them where we haven’t played consistently enough to win back-to-back games, so that’s the challenge for us as a group to figure out how we’re going to rectify it.”
Cam Ward made 19 saves for the win.
“We had some real good shifts in the offensive zone, and I think that tired them out and we just capitalized,” Pesce said. “They had kind of a long shift, and I saw [Nestrasil] in front and aimed for his stick, and it went in.”
In St Louis, the Blues picked up a 3-2 win on the front end of a home-and-home set with the Dallas Stars.
David Backes won it after a nine-round skills competition.
“I figured around seven or eight [rounds] I should re-tie my skates and get ready,” Backes said. “You never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of those things where we score, they score, we don’t score, they don’t score. I was put in a good situation by a lot of guys before me and able to come through. It was a good feeling to get two points. Now we’ve got to go into their barn and have another highly contested 60 minutes.”
The Blues scored five times in the shootout.
“It was long,” Alexander Steen said. “That’s the longest one I’ve been a part of, I think. It was a long one.
“It’s difficult when you give up a 2-0 [lead] like that and then it goes back and forth. I looked at [Allen] when it was over and he just gave me [a relieved look].”
Jake Allen made 22 saves for the win.
“We played very well,” Blues coach Ken Hitchcock said. “We played very well from start to finish. This is similar to the Boston effort [a 2-0 victory against the Boston Bruins on Tuesday]. We did a lot of good things. It would have been an absolute shame to not walk away with points, but we did a number of really good things today.”
Antti Niemi made 35 saves in the tough loss.
In Vancouver, Jannik Hansen‘s goal in the extra session sent the Canucks to a 2-1 win over the Edmonton Oilers.
Hansen beat Cam Talbot on the blocker side for the winner.
“As hard as you can and far [side] somewhere so he has to use his blocker someway, somehow,” Hansen said of where he aimed his shot. “And 3-on-3 you can’t miss the net either, so just trying to balance those two things, get it far enough out that it can go in and not missing the net so it goes the other way.”
Jacob Markstrom made 32 saves for the win; Talbot had 22 saves in the loss.
“We had opportunities, and we had the puck a lot in overtime,” coach Todd McLellan said. “There were a couple of open nets where they whacked at it and they did a good job of getting sticks on it. They came down and Cam had really good position, he was out far, but just slid it through and that happens sometimes.”
Hansen also scored in regulation to tie the game after Mark Letestu had staked the Oilers to a 1-0 lead midway through the first period.
“We’re a better team than how we’re playing. I believe that. I’ve told the players that a number of times,” McLellan said, blaming an 0-for-3 power play and some rust after a four-day off Christmas break. “There were five or six players that were a little ragged and you could tell they hadn’t been on skates, whether it was their polish or the pace they were playing at. Every team has that right now, but the quicker you can clean that up, the better you have an opportunity to win. Now playing this game, maybe that will help us tomorrow, at least in the first half of the game. We need to take advantage of it.”
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