In St Paul, the San Jose Sharks and Minnesota Wild found themselves in a tight, entertaining game on Sunday night.
With the scored tied, 3-3, it wasn’t until the last two minutes that the Sharks pulled away on a goal from Brent Burns with 1:48 left to give the Sharks a 4-3 lead.
Matt Nieto added an empty-net goal with under 30 seconds left in the game to seal it.
Martin Jones made 26 saves to get the win.
“[Jones] was huge for us again tonight, made some huge saves for us at key times,” Burns said. “It’s a big win. I talked about it before, I felt like that was probably our best game by far that we played so far. Most complete, we competed and played hard.
“That would have been a tough one to lose. … You lose that first game, you have to win the second game. … It was nice to get that and feel good. That’s one you hate to see not come through with two points.”
Zach Parise, Nick Bjugstad and Kevin Fiala were the Wild strikers.
“We thought we started fine, but then it just kind of got away from us,” Minnesota head coach Dean Evason said. “They obviously had a lot more shots and attempts; I think they out-chanced us a couple more in that first period, and we thought we were fortunate and then we thought we’d come in and thought maybe [in] the second period we were going to be real good and come out and throw it [at them], and we didn’t.
“For whatever reason, obviously we’ve got to go back and figure out why if it was a mental thing or if it was a physical thing, but we’ll hopefully get that sorted out before we play in a couple of days (against the Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday).”
Minnesota dropped to 4-2-0.
“It does show that we’re resilient and keeping it positive and doing our best to come back,” Bjugstad said. “But more often than not, we can’t keep putting ourselves in those situations and expect to win games.”
Ryan Donato, Evander Kane, Noah Gregor also scored for the Sharks.
“I think it felt better knowing I had so many opportunities the past couple of games and didn’t score,” Donato said. “It’s funny sometimes how the ones [that] are least expected go in and I was just happy with that.”
Kaapo Kahkonen made 31 saves in the loss.
“You’re playing with fire, obviously,” Evason said. “We’ve been fortunate a couple of times to come back from a couple of goals down, and obviously we did it again tonight. But it burnt us in the end.”
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