The Nashville Predators needed win to keep pace with the St Louis Blues, who defeated the Vegas Golden Knights on Monday night, 3-1.
Juuse Saros made 29 saves to shut out the Minnesota Wild, 1-0, in St Paul Monday.
The win kept the Preds two points up on the Blues.
“You work all year to work your way and get into the Stanley Cup playoffs, so tonight was the night we marked it,” Nashville coach Peter Laviolette said. “Fifty percent of the teams, almost, don’t make it. And it’s not an easy thing. Everybody goes into the year with good intentions and everybody has a plan in mind and I’m sure they’re all including the playoffs, so it’s not an easy thing and should never be taken for granted, but our guys worked hard to get to this point. We have to continue to work on our game.”
Ryan Johansen scored early in the first period for all the offense in the game.
“It’s a good feeling. You’ve really got to look at how hard it is to make the playoffs in an 82-game season,” Johansen said. “It’s a great accomplishment and it’s something to be very proud of. At the same time, we have a goal in mind. There’s a lot of work ahead of us still. We’re going to keep our foot down.”
The Predators improved to 43-28-6.
“You look at our team and you see the depth. You go through our whole lineup and there’s a lot of tremendous players on our club,” Johansen said. “We’re all coming together. We’re a pretty darn good hockey team. The focus right now is there’s still a lot of work to be done. We’ll just enjoy this one tonight and enjoy making the playoffs here, get home, go to bed and get back to work.”
The Wild dropped to 35-33-9 and are two points back of the second wild card spot in the Western Conference.
“Our backs are against the wall, but whether Colorado or [the] Arizona [Coyotes], whether they win or lose, we need to win,” Wild forward Jason Zucker said. “For us, we obviously are going to need help, but we need to win. That’s the only thing we can worry about.”
[WATCH: Predators vs. Wild highlights]
Devan Dubnyk made 18 saves in the hard luck loss.
“It is a helpless position. There’s not much we can do about it. Again, the dominoes have got to fall in the right area,” Wild head coach Bruce Boudreau said after the loss. “As long as there’s a breath in our body and we have an opportunity, we’re going to go out and try to play like we did today. I thought we made Nashville look bad. They didn’t have much. I think they had six scoring chances the whole night. We just can’t score. That’s the bottom line right now. … We’re doing the job in that respect, but we just can’t score at this point.”
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