In Nashville, the Predators’ Juuse Saros made 21 saves on Tuesday night in a 3-0 shutout of the visiting Chicago Blackhawks.
“I feel good,” Saros said. “But you’ve got to take it one game at a time and try to find that consistency.”
Gustav Nyquist provided all the offense Saros would need when he potted a goal at 5:16 of the opening stanza.
“It was nice to get the win back at home, and good to see [Saros] get the shutout there,” Nyquist said. “That was awesome. I thought it was an OK game. It was kind of a hard game. They’re checking hard. You get a little timid maybe and don’t want to make a mistake when it’s only 1-0. I didn’t love our second maybe, but good to get the job done.”
The Predators improved to 21-16-1.
“He’s playing great,” Predators captain Roman Josi said of Nyquist. “I feel like he’s been playing great the whole year. He’s so good on the power play. He’s great. He’s very patient with the puck. He makes some really good plays. He’s an awesome leader in our locker room. He’s been nothing but great since he came here.”
The Blackhawks dropped to 11-24-2 off their third straight loss.
“I think we did pretty good in front of our net tonight,” Chicago’s Nikita Zaitsev said. “We’d love to win, especially for [Soderblom]. He made lots of crazy saves today. Unfortunately we didn’t [win], but still it’s a good game. We can think about it and just keep going from that.”
The score remained 1-0 until the third period when Ryan O’Reilly hit off a two-skater power play at 15:23 for a 2-0 advantage.
“It was just great efforts by [Forsberg],” O’Reilly said. “Obviously it’s a big situation. We want to get a goal there and such, and he just works and works, wins a play and then draws a penalty. That play on that goal, anyone could’ve scored that. It was an amazing play he made to me there.”
Luke Evangelista hit an empty net with 33 seconds left for the 3-0 final count.
Arvid Soderblom made 33 saves in the loss.
“I thought the guys battled,” Blackhawks coach Luke Richardson said. “It was the first step of where we want to go. We don’t like the results. We can’t accept them in this league, but the coaching staff is proud of how we asked them to battle yesterday at practice and bring it to tonight’s game. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any luck around their net, but the process of how we want to play is there.
Chicago’s Anthony Beauvillier left the ice with an apparent injury in the middle frame.
“It didn’t look good,” Richardson said. “He obviously didn’t finish the game, and we’ll get to New York tomorrow and see how he’s feeling there and go from there. We were short-staffed at the wrong time because [Blackhawks forward Nick Foligno] was in the box as well.”
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