Three periods and six regulation goals weren’t enough to decide a matchup between the Nashville Predators and Montreal Canadiens on Saturday night, but it was Filip Forsberg and the Preds that found a way to win an overtime thriller, 4-3, at Bridgestone Arena.
Forsberg played the hero in the 3-on-3 period, sniping his 11th goal of the season off a beautiful feed from Mikael Granlund from behind the net. Forsberg fumbled his stick on the left wing just seconds before scoring, and by the time he picked it back up, Granlund delivered the puck right to his tape and the winger took care of the rest.
“I just liked our mental toughness tonight,” Preds Head Coach John Hynes said after the win. “We went through a bunch of adversity in the second period, came up with a huge kill at a key time, which I think, to me, is why we stress so much mental and physical toughness… This is the game we have to get back to, and we’ve got to have some perseverance and ultra-competitiveness. We went out and had to come from behind again, but I felt we played pretty well in the third period, and it’s nice to see us be able to get the win from it. So, lots of lessons out of this game.”
“I think it was one of those games where, first period was really good, we got a lot of chances, we just didn’t bear down on them,” Forsberg said. “We should have probably had a little bit of a bigger lead there, and then the second period was kind of so-so, and then we just took it right back at them in the third.”
The Preds got 20 saves from Juuse Saros between the pipes and tallies from Eeli Tolvanen, Tanner Jeannot and Luke Kunin propelled them to a victory. Both Tolvanen and Jeannot scored by redirecting slapshots from Mattias Ekholm, giving the Swede his fourth and fifth assists of the season.
