Hurricanes earn 3-1 win over Habs

Peter Koutroumpis, Triangle Sports Network
Peter Koutroumpis, Triangle Sports Network

MONTREAL, QUEBEC – The Carolina Hurricanes put together a winning effort and left ‘la belle province’ with a 3-1 win over the Montreal Canadiens at Centre Bell on Saturday.

Leading into the second game of a back-to-back set against Les Habitants in the province of Quebec, the Hurricanes had previously lost three straight preseason games and not scored a goal in their most recent four periods of play.

However, Carolina ended its scoring drought during the first period, led 3-0 after two periods of play, and allowed goaltender Anton Khudobin to record his first victory with the team while stopping 41 pucks in the process.

“We’ve been doing it wrong,” Hurricanes coach Kirk Muller joked afterwards.

“We’ve been outshooting teams and doin’ it the other way. We’re just getting to know him (Khudobin), but we’re obviously excited to have him in our organization. He’s got a lot of structure to his game there and he’s a real competitor. He’s been a great addition so far.”

Captain Eric Staal (2 assists) contributed significantly to the offense and helped to set up the Hurricanes’ first goal of the game from Drayson Bowman that came at the 14:54 mark of the opening period.

Jeff Skinner scored the eventual game winner at 2:24 into the second, while Nathan Gerbe’s power play goal later in the period gave the Hurricanes the cushion it needed to earn the win.

The play of the team’s penalty killing units also contributed significantly to the win as they denied Montreal’s power play from scoring on eight attempts.

Muller indicated that the four-game evaluation period that he and his staff had put all players on the training camp roster through was over, and that the team’s final two preseason games would be used to prepare for the regular season.

“I was really pleased with our effort tonight,” Muller said.

“We’ve got two games left. We had four in four, now we’ve got two games. We’ll fine tune this week. We’ve got seven or eight practices to work on all our systems and two games to put our team together. We’re on target with what we wanted to achieve at the start of camp.”