In Nashville Thursday, the Minnesota Wild benefitted from wo goals from Eric Staal in a 5-2 win over the Predators.
“We’re just trying to keep this going,” Staal said. “You never want to give anyone anything back. We had a good first period and really set the tone, and I think from there maybe not as sharp, but you’ve got to find ways to win. It wasn’t the prettiest tonight, but we’ve got a solid team and a great goalie right now.”
Devan Dubnyk won for the eighth time in his last 10 starts (8-0-2) and made 34 saves for the win.
WATCH: All Wild vs. Predators highlights
“We just want to continue to build our game,” Dubnyk said. “It’s not just one game because we play again in a day and a half so we’re just trying to build on what things we’re doing well and continue to roll.”
The Wild have now won six straight and are 17-8-4.
Jonas Brodin, Charlie Coyle and Mikael Granlund also scored for the Wild.
Pekka Rinne took the loss on 14 saves.
“It was the way [the first period] ended,” Predators coach Peter Laviolette said. “I mean, we’ll go back and look at this, we probably played 50 to 55 minutes that we really liked. They probably had 10 chances. They got four in the last two minutes of the first period and three in the last two minutes of the second period and not a lot more than that. It did us in.”
The Wild took advantage of the Preds pulling Rinne in the third period and scored twice in the open Nashville net.
Ryan Ellis and Mike Fisher were the Nashville goals scorers.
“We’re giving up too many real good scoring chances, and that’s what killed us tonight,” Fisher said. “We knew that coming in. We did get our fair share of chances, but we’ve got to be better defensively.”
The Predators fell to 13-12-4 with the loss.
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