TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — The Buffalo Sabres long ago fell out of playoff contention. They still might be a factor in the postseason.
Jason Pominville scored on a power play at 1:26 of overtime to give the Sabres a 2-1 victory over the NHL-leading Tampa Bay Lightning on Wednesday night.
Pominville beat Andrei Vasilevskiy with a one-timer from the left circle off a feed from Rasmus Ristolainen.
Evan Rodrigues tied it for Buffalo in the third, and Chad Johnson stopped 21 shots.
The victory was the second in a row against Tampa Bay in the past two weeks. The Sabres, last in the Eastern Conference, also knocked off second-place Boston Bruins twice in February.
“Everybody really played good defensively,” Buffalo coach Phil Housley said. “I’ve got to hand it to our guys, they really played hard and took away time and space against a really good hockey team.”
Cory Conacher scored for Tampa Bay, which saw a four-game winning streak come to an end, and Vasilevskiy made 32 saves.
With a point in the standings for the overtime loss, the Lightning became the first team to reach 90 points this season.
“We’ll take the points where we can get them, but we didn’t really deserve the two points tonight,” Tampa Bay defenseman Dan Girardi said. “We had good spots in the game but against a team that’s not in the playoffs and [if] we want to stay atop our division and the league we need the same effort we had against Toronto [on Monday] with the emotion and desperation and it just wasn’t there tonight.”
With NHL scoring leader Nikita Kucherov out with an undisclosed upper-body injury, the Lightning struggled to generate offensive chances and finished with 18 even-strength shots on goal.
Canadiens 3, Islanders 1
MONTREAL — Jonathan Drouin and Nikita Scherbak scored in the second period and Montreal beat New York to extend its points streak to five games.
Paul Byron also scored and Antti Niemi made 27 saves to help the Canadiens improve to 2-0-3 in their last five. Mathew Barzal scored his 18th of the season for the Islanders. They are winless in last four games and 4-8-2 in their last 14.
Blues 2, Red Wings 1
ST. LOUIS — Carter Hutton made 35 saves, Scottie Upshall and Alex Pietrangelo scored and St. Louis beat Detroit to snap a seven-game losing streak.
Hutton improved to 6-2-1 in his last nine starts and 16-7-2 overall, allowing only Andreas Athanasiou’s goal with 1:45 left.
Avalanche 4, Flames 2
DENVER — Nathan MacKinnon and Tyson Barrie each had a goal and an assist in Colorado’s victory over Calgary.
Matt Nieto and Nikita Zadorov also scored, and Semyon Varlamov made 30 saves. The Avalanche have won 11 of 12 home games. Mikael Backlund and Michael Frolik scored for Calgary.
Rangers 6, Canucks 5, OT
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — John Gilmour scored from a sharp angle 1:22 into overtime and goaltender Henrik Lundqvist made a season-high 50 saves to help the Rangers beat the Canucks.
Vancouver’s Brock Boeser forced overtime when he scored his second goal of the night with 45.9 seconds left. The Canucks had pulled their goaltender for an extra attacker.
Mika Zibanejad had given New York a 5-4 lead less than five minutes earlier.
Kevin Hayes scored twice for the Rangers (28-30-6), who snapped a seven-game losing streak. Vladislav Namestnikov, obtained in a multi-player trade from Tampa Bay on Monday, had a goal and an assist. Jimmy Vesey had the other New York goal while Ryan Spooner had three assists.
