Preds beat Chicago 3-2, push Hawks to brink of elimination

But the Blackhawks, winners of three Stanley Cup titles in the past seven years, now trail 0-3 for the first time since the 2011 quarterfinals. And the reality of the sport is that every player spends far more time without the puck than with it.

The Predators put the Chicago Blackhawks on the brink of elimination after taking a 3-0 series lead courtesy of a 3-2 come-from-behind overtime victory Monday. He skated Sunday morning and could play Monday night. But it did, and now the Hawks are 60 minutes away from seeing another year of their championship window close in the first round.

“Demoralizing and disappointing. there’s probably a lot more words, but they called it”, Cassidy said of referee Tim Peel’s call. They’re too dependent on their star players at this point for them not to be the best players on the team pretty much all the time. “They’re pushing themselves to the limit”. “Shift after shift, game after game, they come. You never know what can happen”. The 3-0 series lead is thanks in large to Rinne, who pitched shutouts in Games 1 and 2 and now has a.974 save percentage through the first three games.

The Hawks have faced playoff deficits and they have had to win key games on the road, but it’s an especially empty feeling when your top players look just as helpless as the rest of the team. “I didn’t think after two games at home that we’d be talking about this already, that it’s do or die, but we’re going to go into that next game with that mentality”.

Now it is anybody’s game, and as overtime began, no one thought, even though he has been playing great hockey lately, no one saw Kevin Fiala’s coming out party coming. “We had to claw and fight our way back, and got it done in overtime”. Neal passed the puck to Fiala along the boards, who dropped to puck back to Neal. Ryan Johansen scored a goal and drew two assists, defenseman Ryan Ellis starred again with a marker and 11 total shots, and all four lines potted goals. Quenneville conceded he wasn’t expecting to win the challenge, just that it was worth “a shot”. The other lines kept trying to carry the puck in and dance around a stacked blue line of Predators.

Fiala finally converted on his third chance in overtime. “So it would have been nice to have a little push back there”.

What’s more, the Predators have played with the kind of defensive structure and discipline they lacked at times during a 41-29-12 regular season.

After the Blackhawks tallied two, the Predators answered back with a freakish goal early in the third period, as Filip Forsberg poked in a puck that took an unusual bounce off a stanchion on the board behind Corey Crawford and landed right in the crease, out of the goaltender’s sight.