In Ottawa, Mike Smith made 39 saves and the Edmonton Oilers defeated the Senators, 3-1, on Thursday.
With the win, the Oilers swept the season series for the Sens
“It’s pretty impressive when you think about it,” Smith said. “You don’t really get that opportunity too often, and especially as well as the team on the other side has played, and how they’ve gotten better, it seems, every time we’ve played them. We just kind of found ways to get wins. It just shows the resilience of our group.”
Connor Brown was the lone goal scorer for Ottawa.
“You just keep playing like that and you’re going to win more times than not,” Senators head coach D.J. Smith said. “We’ve won more games this year when we didn’t play anywhere close to as well as we played tonight. That’s just sometimes the way it goes.”
The game was tied heading to the third period, Devin Shore snapped the tie just past the midway point of the third.
“It’s different. Obviously, you don’t play a team that many times, or I’ve never done it in all my years in the NHL,” Oilers head coach Dave Tippett said. “There were some games that were real close, that could go either way. There were some games that I don’t think their goaltending was as good as it could’ve been, and we took advantage of it. It’s just funny how it went.”
Jesse Puljujarvi added an empty-netter for the sealer.
“I give Ottawa a ton of credit,” Tippett said. “They played very well, they played hard. [Mike Smith] made some real big saves for us to kind of keep us in the game, and we got a little scoring. Shore gets a big goal at the right time and we were able to push the game along. But it was a hard-fought battle.”
Anton Forsberg made 20 saves in the loss.
“I think we deserved that game,” Ottawa’s Brady Tkachuk said. “It’s frustrating. We did a lot of great things today. I thought we played our best game of the series against this team, and it just didn’t go our way tonight. Definitely frustrating, and especially with our record.”
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