In St Paul on Tuesday night, Jeff Carter struck for the game-tying goal, 2-2, to help the Los Angeles Kings force extra time against the Minnesota Wild.
The extra session was not enough and the Wild eventually pulled out the win when Jason Zucker was the only shooter to pot a goal in the skills competition.
The Wild skated off with the 3-2 win.
Jason Zucker had only goal in skills conpetition to give WIld the win – file photo courtesy of Lewis Bleiman
The Wild rebounded from a dreadful 7-4 loss in Philadelphia.
Nino Niederreiter and Eric Staal scored in regulation for Minnesota.
“Any win right now is big,” Stalock said. “We’ve got a break looming in four games. That means we’re not playing for seven days and teams are picking up points, so these next four are games where we have to pick up points. It started tonight.”
Alex Stalock made 31 saves to get the win and stopped three shooters in the shootout.
“At the end of the day, you try to go out there and do the best you can do,” Niederreiter said. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m glad it worked out tonight.”
Ilya Kovalchuk scored his eighth of the season.
“I thought we were probably lucky to get a point,” Carter said. “We had a slow start. [The Wild] played last night. They traveled last night. We had a slow start. We got it to overtime, which was good. We showed some battle and got back, but probably not our best game.”
The Kings dropped to 18-25-4.
The Wild improved to 23-20-3.
“I feel that [we] deserved it. There’s so many times in the last month that [our team] played so well and they haven’t got anything from it. It accentuates the couple times they’ve played real bad,” Wild head coach Bruce Boudreau said. “I didn’t see just the two games [a 4-0 loss at the Boston Bruins on Jan. 8 and a 5-2 loss to the Detroit Red Wings on Jan. 12]. Other than that, they’ve competed really, really hard, and hopefully, and I pretty well know, they’ll do that more times than they won’t.”
[WATCH: All Kings vs. Wild highlights]
Jonathan Quick made 40 saves in the loss.
“I thought [Quick] got us that point. Simple as that,” Kings defenseman Alec Martinez said. “Without him in the net, could have been 8-1, I don’t know. He stood on his head and he’s the reason we got the point.”
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