The sweep of the NHL starts in Sunrise where the Nashville Predators continued their game with a 3-2 win after the skills competition over the Panthers.
Filip Forsberg scored with less than five minutes left in regulation to force extra time and Carter Hutton made 34 saves to get the win.
“Filip was terrific,” Predators coach Peter Laviolette said. “He’s been that way all year. He’s put up a lot of points and played a lot of big minutes and put in big situations like he was tonight and he delivered. Ekblad has had a terrific year, a terrific start to his young career as well. We don’t get to see him as much, but certainly when you see him, his size and his presence, the way he can move the puck out there, it’s impressive.”
Florida’s rookie star, Aaron Ekblad, also had a goal in the losing effort.
“It may be a point that got away,” said Ekblad, the No. 1 pick at the 2014 NHL Draft. “We definitely had a lot of opportunities. Things just happen that way sometimes. You’re not going to get all the bounces in every game. I think we showed a pretty great effort as a team.”
Florida had taken a 2-0 lead in the second period but the Preds were ready coming out of the second intermission.
“We didn’t like our effort through the first two periods,” Hutton said. “We tried to get it going here. It’s tough the back-to-back games. Our mentality was if we worked hard in their zone, we were going to generate some power plays. And we ended up getting a couple of power plays, and it came through big time for us tonight.”
In St Louis, the Blues were looking to get back to winning after a dreadful 7-1 loss to the Blue Jackets Friday.
The Chicago Blackhawks had other ideas as they posted a 4-2 win Sunday.
The talk after the game was about the 4-3-0 road trip record and the fact the Hawks now look forward to an eight-game homestand.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been on any team that had eight straight home games,” Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville said. “It should be fun.
“Individually, you’d say six of the seven we played the right way [during the trip] and played well.”The Minnesota game [on Feb. 3] we sat in the garbage can.”
Chicago got two goals from Marian Hossa and markers from Marcus Kruger, and Bryan Bickell.
“That’s the first time I’ve seen them use that play on their rush attack and they got us on the gap on the rush,” Blues coach Ken Hitchcock said. “… I think just gap up. We had new people on the ice, people that hadn’t played together. When Bouwmeester goes up, you’ve got different people killing penalties. We didn’t have a tough enough gap in the middle with the forward.”
The Hawks pushed the play all game and the Blues were on their heels for much of the contest.
Corey Crawford made 25 saves for the win.
“I thought in the third period we looked tired, played tired,” Hitchcock said. “Whether it was what they did or what we did, I think a lot of it was us having to come back in the game. The whole game today, we had to mount a comeback. We ended up exerting a lot of energy, probably shortened our bench a little bit more than we normally do.”
In Boston, the Montreal Canadiens defeated the Bruins, 3-1, and in the process swept the season series.
Carey Price made 34 saves for the win.
“I think we lost too many battles, and again you can’t beat a team like that if you’re not going to win your battles, which is what we should be good at,” Bruins coach Claude Julien said. “When we did kind of pushed our game on them in spurts we were getting some success but, you know, if you can’t sustain it throughout the whole game then you’re not going to get the results and we got them in spurts tonight. I don’t think we made Carey Price‘s night real hard. He didn’t have to move much. He just stood there, stopped the shots, so those are areas that weren’t good enough. And in order to beat this team that really gets up for us our best players have to be our best players and we didn’t have that tonight.”
Max Pacioretty, Dale Weise and Andrei Markov scored for the Habs.
“I don’t have the answer. You know our line has a lot of chemistry, me, David, [Pacioretty], we love playing together,” Weise said. “Early in the year we just had a couple shifts together and we seem to have some instant chemistry and we’re getting a chance to play together for full games and we are really getting comfortable with each other. We just feel dangerous every time we go out there we try to score.”
Tuukka Rask had 31 saves in the loss for the B’s.
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