In St Paul, the Minnesota Wild’s Frederick Gaudreau hit for a double on Wednesday night in a 4-1 win over the Detroit Red Wings.
Gaudreau scored his first in the opening frame for a 1-0 lead, off the power play.
Filip Gustavsson made 16 saves in the Minnesota win.
The Wild improved to 16-11-2.
“We thought it was just a really stingy hockey game,” Minnesota coach Dean Evason said. “We played strong defensively, they did [too]. There wasn’t a lot of exchanges.”
Matt Dumba scored at 8:01 of the second period to give the Wild a 2-0 advantage.
Detroit got on the board at 18:41 of the middle frame when Elmer Soderblom to cut the Red Wings’ deficit in half at 2-1.
“I loved our response tonight,” Detroit coach Derek Lalonde said. “I’m very disappointed in the final outcome, but I thought we had great pushback. We had a great pushback at 2-nothing. We had a great pushback in the third, which is a good sign again.
“It just feels like we didn’t give up a whole lot. You might be talking about under 10 chances against. We lost the special teams battle again and just the two breakdowns for goals.”
The euphoria was short-lived for Detroit.
Mats Zuccarello scored just 16 seconds later to restore the two-goal lead for the Wild, 3-1.
“Just lucky. Nice to see it go in,” Zuccarello said. “It was a big goal to go into intermission with [a two-goal lead] instead of one. That was big.”
Zuccarello has an eight-game active streak.
Detroit dropped to 13-10-6.
“I hope that teams find it difficult to play against us,” Evason said. “Not only just physically but because we’re hopefully relentless not only in the defensive zone, but in the offensive zone as well hunting pucks down and keeping pucks in. That is our identity and that is what we want to be, and we’ve got to that point. So now the challenge again is to continually do that on a nightly basis just over and over again and if we do that, we give ourselves a real good opportunity.”
Gaudreau added his second marker late in the third on an empty-net strike for the 4-1 final.
Magnus Hellberg made 18 saves in the Detroit loss.
“Obviously, that’s a goal you want back,” Hellberg said of Zuccarello’s goal. “Everyone froze a little bit. I have to be faster making that save, especially in a crucial moment in the game like that we just scored. It killed our momentum a little bit, so yeah, of course it was a tough one for sure.”
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