Best team in the league comes into your building? No problem for the Carolina Hurricanes. The Canes beat the NHL-leading Columbus Blue Jackets 5-3 Tuesday night, improving their record on home ice this season to 13-4-1.
For the Canes (19-15-7), tonight’s game against Columbus (28-8-4) represented an opportunity to show their continued growth and improvement against a top opponent.
“I think it’s definitely a confident group right now,” forward Brock McGinn said. “I think we can play against any team in this league right now and we showed that tonight. We just need to stay on it, keep going and hopefully keep winning.”
The Blue Jackets got off to an early start in this game. Leading Columbus scorer Cam Atkinson took a puck from behind the net and slipped a backhander through Ward’s pads, a goal the veteran netminder would likely want a do-over on.
The team wasted little time taking the lead in the second period, getting two quick strikes from forwards Jeff Skinner and Derek Ryan to make it 2-1. The newly-reunited line of Skinner, Ryan and forward Victor Rask combined for eight points against the Jackets.
“Recently, we haven’t been producing as much as we’d like,” Skinner said. “It’s nice to contribute to a win.”
Unfortunately for the Canes, the lead was short-lived. Jackets forward Josh Anderson threw a backhander on net, and the fluttering puck bounced off Ward’s shoulder and in for a strange goal and 2-2 tie.
The Canes went back on top with just over six minutes left in the middle frame. On a delayed penalty sequence, defenseman Matt Tennyson circled the net and made a perfect pass from Gretzky’s office to McGinn at the top of the crease, and his snap-shot put Carolina up 3-2.
The goal-fest continued late into the period, as Columbus came in on a two-on-one rush following a Canes turnover at the offensive blue line. Forward Brandon Saad beat Ward five-hole to tie the game at three with less than a minute to play in the second.
“I thought we worked for our goals, and a couple of theirs we kind of gifted them, gave them to them a little bit easier than we’d like,” head coach Bill Peters said. “We’ll look at that, address that and learn from that, especially when we play [Columbus] again in a week.”
In his first game back in the lineup after missing five games due to injury, forward Elias Lindholm helped the Canes take a 4-3 lead less than four minutes into the third. The Swedish winger put a shot on net from the boards that deflected in off forward Jordan Staal in front of the net.
“It’s always important to get to the net,” Staal said. “Tonight was no different. For myself especially, even though I’ve had breakaways that I’ve missed as of late, it was nice to get one that was a little more greasy than others.
The Jackets pressed hard the rest of the game, but Ward, the defense and a little luck kept the home team in front. Rask iced the game with an empty-net goal with 20.1 seconds to play. The Canes’ NHL-best penalty kill was excellent again tonight, shutting out Columbus’ power play on four opportunities, which also ranks first in the NHL coming into the game.
The win, coupled with a loss by the Philadelphia Flyers, who currently occupy the final wild card spot in the Eastern Conference, moves the Canes within three points of that coveted playoff spot with two games in hand on the Flyers.
Earlier in the season, a game like this, a tightly-contested affair with the team holding a late lead was the type the Canes might have let slip away. Now, the team is finding ways to close these games out.
“We’ve been in enough of them, so we’re comfortable in that regard,” Peters said. “We have more guys with more poise now, so we can play more guys coming down the stretch and I think that’s important.”
The Canes will continue this four-game homestand Friday when the Buffalo Sabres come to PNC for the third and final game of that season series for Carolina.
