In Tampa, Dallas’ Joe Pavelski scored twice and picked up four points in a 5-2 Stars win over the Lightning on Friday night.
“Obviously we had to be desperate tonight,” Pavelski said. “We did a lot of good things. Early on we got pucks behind them, forechecked, we controlled the play that way. It gave us a boost, I think, for sure.”
Anton Khudobin made 26 saves in the win.
“We had to win tonight, clearly,” Stars head coach Rick Bowness. “We did what we had to do tonight, now we’re going to need a little help. If we get some help from Carolina, we feel good about our game going into Sunday.”
Blake Coleman had a goal for the Lightning.
“We didn’t play very well,” Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said. “We didn’t execute. We didn’t defend well, and we didn’t compete hard in the way that we normally do. We turned the game into a little bit of a one-on-one game, not only with but without the puck.”
Roope Hintz, Joel Kiviranta and Jamie Oleksiak added single markers for the Stars.
“I think it’s been really good for us and it’s been going good all season together,” Hintz said. “I think we’ve found each other well and we like to play with each other, so that’s the biggest thing.”
Dallas now trails the Nashville Predators by just two points in the race for the fourth spot in the Central division playoff race.
“We spent more time in their zone,” Bowness said. “We put more pucks toward the net tonight than we did last game (a 6-2 loss to Tampa Bay on Wednesday). We weren’t happy with that. We weren’t happy with our zone time in the last game.
“So in this morning’s meeting, we put a lot of focus on those two areas: we need to spend more time deep in their zone, we need to get our [defensemen] involved, get more shots from our D, which we got tonight, and we need to put more pucks toward the net, which we did tonight.”
Tampa’s Alex Barre-Boulet scored near the midway point of the third period, off the power play, to make the 5-2 final.
“A lack of attention to detail; obviously we’ve been pretty strong in the late run that we’ve been on,” Coleman said. “For whatever reason we had some big, glaring errors defensively and left [McElhinney] out to dry, unfortunately. And they were able to convert.”
Curtis McElhinney made 26 saves in the loss.
“I just think we could’ve been better and cleaner in the D-zone,” Tampa Bay’s Pat Maroon said. “I think we could’ve done a better job of pushing the puck a little more north. I wish we would’ve had a better response, but we’ve got a big game tomorrow.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.