Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and the Edmonton Oilers went into Friday’s Game 5 of the NHL Western Conference Finals determined to score if they got a power-play chance and did it twice in a 3-1 win over the top-seeded Dallas Stars to take a 3-2 series lead and get within one victory of going to the Stanley Cup Finals.
“We’ve been pushing and they obviously don’t take a lot of penalties. You don’t have three, four or five opportunities a game to find your rhythm,” Nugent-Hopkins said. “So going into tonight, we wanted to make sure that if we only got one, we were going to make it count.”
There had not been a power-play goal by either team in this series until Nugent-Hopkins scored on a rebound only 18 seconds after a penalty in the first period, only their seventh chance against Dallas. That was 2 seconds longer than it took for him to score with a man advantage again after a penalty just a minute into the second period.
Photo: AFP
“If you’re going to draw up a road game, that’s much what you want to do,” Stars coach Pete DeBoer said. “Come out, get two power-play goals early in the game, get the lead and then defend well all night.”
Stuart Skinner stopped 19 shots for the Oilers, while Philip Broberg scored from just inside the blue line. Evan Bouchard assisted on both of the power-play goals, while captain Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl each had a helper on one of them.
“I thought right from start to finish we were dialed in,” McDavid said.
Photo: Chris Jones-USA Today
With a win at home today, the Oilers would advance to their first Stanley Cup Finals since 2006. They were 5-12-1 in November last year.
The Stars jumped ahead 2-0 in the first 5 minutes, 29 seconds of Game 4 in Edmonton and looked as though they were ready to take a stranglehold on the series. Instead, they did not have another goal for nearly 109 minutes stretched over six periods for their longest scoring drought of the post-season.
“We’ve been a bit disjointed offensively this whole series,” Stars center Matt Duchene said. “So hopefully we can find it here next game.”
If not, their season will end in Game 6 of the West Finals for the second year in a row.
Edmonton scored eight consecutive goals, getting even by the end of the first period on Wednesday, part of five unanswered goals in a 5-2 victory before going ahead 3-0 on Friday. The Stars, now 4-6 at home this post-season, finally got another puck in the net when Wyatt Johnston scored with 5 minutes, 51 seconds left.
Jake Oettinger had 23 saves for the Stars.
Dallas had only six shots on goal halfway through the game, but Skinner already had some quality stops by then — and more after that, including on the Stars’ only power play late in the second period.
“Stu was just solid. He was square, he was quick,” coach Kris Knoblauch said. “We win 3-1 tonight and I think that’s a little skewed. I don’t think we were that much better tonight. I think just the fact that Stu had so many big saves gave us a little bit of a cushion and made it look easier than it was for our team.”
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