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Wild rally past Coyotes; Carcillo’s 2-goal night ruined
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OBSTACLE: The Wild’s Mark Parrish, left, centers the puck Saturday while avoiding Coyotes defenseman Nick Boynton.
The Associated Press
Instead of losing his temper, Minnesota winger Eric Belanger got even with Phoenix by scoring the winning goal.
After being struck in the face and losing a tooth, Belanger scored a short-handed goal late in the third period and the Minnesota Wild rallied to beat the Phoenix Coyotes 3-2 on Saturday night at Glendale.
Belanger knocked in the rebound from a Stephane Veilleux backhander at 16:45. That came just more than three minutes after Mikko Koivu tied the score for Minnesota with 6 minutes, 20 seconds remaining.
Wild goalie Niklas Backstrom surrendered two first-period goals, but none thereafter. He had 27 saves.
Phoenix goalie Alex Auld stopped 23 shots.
The Wild scored first when Marian Gaborik converted a perfect centering pass from Pavol Demitra at 4:09 of the opening period.
Then, Daniel Carcillo struck twice for Phoenix.
First on the power play, he scored on a scramble in front of the goal at 14:51 of the first period. Just more than two minutes later, Carcillo skated into a pass from Niko Kapanen and beat Backstrom with a slap shot from the right faceoff circle.
The two tallies marked the first multigoal game for Carcillo in his two-year NHL career.
“We need to be more disciplined in the third period,” he said. “We took it to them in the first two periods, but obviously we didn’t get the result we wanted.”
The effort also marked the second straight multiple goal game for a Phoenix player. Winger Fredrik Sjostrom had a hat trick Thursday at Nashville.
Though the second period was scoreless, each team had several good chances. The best for Phoenix occurred when captain Shane Doan hit the right post with just more than five minutes remaining in the period.
Then with less than one minute remaining, Auld stopped Gaborik in close.
“That was a heartbreaker to lose because we played well against a very good team,” said Coyotes coach Wayne Gretzky. “It was a good effort, but we took three undisciplined penalties late, and two of those cost us the game.”
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