Don’t look now but the Carolina Hurricanes are playing good hockey and they continued that trend Friday night with a 2-1 win over the Pittsburgh Penguins in Raleigh.
Cam Ward made 27 saves in the win to solidify his position as the new number one goalie in Carolina.
“I thought we managed the puck really good in the second period,” Hurricanes head coach Bill Peters said. “It might have been our best period. We had some odd-man rushes that we could have capitalized on to get a little wiggle room, but we didn’t.”
Derek Ryan and Sebastian Aho struck in the middle frame for the Canes as they improved to 18-12-7 with the win.
“Winning teams are able to grind their way to a hard 2-1 win against a really good Pittsburgh team. It’s something this team has struggled to do in the past. It’s a lot of little things adding up to victories [lately]: executing on the game plan, specialty teams have been better and goaltending has been great too,” Ryan said after the tight win.
Carolina in 7-1-0 in their last eight games.
“As a defensive corps, I think we did a really good job from top to bottom,” the Canes’ Jaccob Slavin, said. “They’ve got a lot of high-end talent on that team, so you’ve got to take away as much as you can with them because they’re going to make plays out of nothing.”
Brian Dumoulin had the lone strike for {Pittsburgh when he gave the Pens a 1-0 lead.
“We get the first goal [so] we accomplished what we wanted in the first period,” Pens head coach Mike Sullivan said. “But I thought there was a letdown in the second period. We spent a lot of time in our defensive zone.”
[WATCH:Â All Penguins vs. Hurricanes highlights]
Tristan Jarry made 31 saves in the loss as the Pens fell to 19-17-3 with the loss.
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