NHL Daily Sweep – 6 February 2016

The sweep of the NHL from Friday night starts in Calgary, where the Columbus Blue Jackets got a strong effort from across the bench and defeated the Flames, 2-1.

William Karlsson scored both goals for the Jackets.

“It feels good to win and score two goals,” Karlsson said. “Obviously, I haven’t been too spoiled with the goals this year. It’s always nice to score.”

Goalie Joonas Korpisalo made 30 for the win to improve to 6-1-1. NHL Daily Sweep 3

“I’m not thinking about it,” Korpisalo said. “I’m just trying to do my best every night and trying to enjoy this every day in here. Day by day.

“It’s not easy, I can tell you. After the first game I played here, I knew that when I play good, I can do really good in this league. I’ve just got to do it every night, not just every second night. Every night.”

The Jackets went 2-1-0 on their road trip out west.

“It feels good,” Blue Jackets defenseman Seth Jones said. “We’re playing the right way right now, which is the most important thing, and we’re playing as a team. No one is trying to do it by themselves. We’re playing great hockey. Our goaltending has been phenomenal, [Korpisalo] in net, and our D corps has been pretty solid; we’re not giving up too many goals per game, which is nice.”

Jiri Hudler was the lone goal scorer for the Flames.

“It is really frustrating,” Calgary rookie forward Sam Bennett said. “We know how important the wins are right now, so we got to get on a streak and keep the wins going.”

It was another difficult loss for the Flames who are three games under .500 and fading.

“Bottom line is one goal, you’re not going to win many games in this league,” Flames captain Mark Giordano said. “I don’t know what else to say. We have to create more, we have to score more goals. Bottom line. Two goals against is pretty good on most nights.”

In Tampa, the Lightning used two goals from both Ondrej Palat and Anton Stralman to help defeat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 6-3.

Tyler Johnson and Alex Killorn added goals for the Bolts.

“I think we all believe we have a pretty good offense when we’re rolling,” said Johnson, who had two assists for his first three-point game since April 9. “I don’t know if we’ve seen that throughout the entire season, but for the last streak, I think our offense has arrived.”

Patric Hornqvist, Sidney Crosby and Matt Cullen scored for the Pens who had been on a four-game streak of their own.

“We were trying to play catch-up for a good chunk of the game there,” Crosby said. “We make it 3-2, and they get that power-play goal and we’re down by two again. It’s not exactly the way you want to play a game. I thought we climbed back into it a number of times, but ultimately it caught up to us.”

It was the eighth straight home win for the Lightning and 11th in 12 games overall.

“It’s one of those things that we kind of just think the offense is going to come, and it has the past two years,” Killorn said. “I think this year was a little bit different. We weren’t scoring at the beginning, but we were there defensively. We had to find ways to score, and it’s nice to kind of find it at this point of the season.”

The Pens dropped to 25-18-7.

“It’s discouraging; we played hard, we played the right way for the most part and we don’t get rewarded for it,” Pittsburgh coach Mike Sullivan said. “I thought we could have been a little bit smarter on the goals, but I thought our energy was good and we controlled the play for the first period. But that’s hockey. Sometimes we have to find a way to stay the course.”

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