Music: {allcanada} Seguin, Hemsky help Stars edge Flames in shootout

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

{allcanada} Seguin, Hemsky help Stars edge Flames in shootout

Brad Pitt / Britney Spears / Colin Farrell / Angelina Jolie

CALGARY -- Tyler Seguin scored the shootout winner and Ales Hemsky had two goals to help the Dallas Stars to a 4-3 win against the Calgary Flames at Scotiabank Saddledome on Wednesday.

Jamie Benn scored for the Stars (36-28-10), who have won four straight games, seven of eight and nine of the past 11. The victory moves Dallas within six points of the idle Winnipeg Jets, who hold the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the Western Conference, with eight games remaining.

Kari Lehtonen, who made 31 saves for the Stars and denied all three shots in the shootout. He has not lost on the road since Jan. 27 at the Montreal Canadiens (9-0-0).

Calgary (40-27-7) remained in third place in the Pacific Division and moved one point ahead of the Los Angeles Kings, who have a game in hand.

In the first round of the shootout, Seguin skated in on Karri Ramo and put a shot over his glove. Lehtonen denied Joe Colborne, Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan to preserve the win.

Seguin's shootout winner came after Deryk Engelland forced overtime, scoring his second of the game by sending a knuckler from the point that weaved through traffic and over Lehtonen's shoulder to tie the game 3-3 at 11:19.

In what Seguin called a "must-win" game, the Stars came out strong in the first period.

Denied on his first attempt from in close, Benn kicked his own rebound up to his stick and tried to tuck a shot by the pad of Ramo, but the puck popped up and rested on Ramo's leg up against the goal line on Dallas' first scoring chance 6:30 into the game.

With Markus Granlund serving a double-minor for high sticking, the Stars had five shots on Ramo, including a sequence that featured a blocker save off Benn followed by a kick-save off Seguin, as well as a slap shot from Alex Goligoski that was also denied by Ramo's pad midway through the period.

Mikael Backlund put a shot off the crossbar on a setup by Lance Bouma with 2:16 remaining to keep the game scoreless.

After Hemsky put the Stars up 1-0 47 seconds into the second, Benn extended the lead 10 minutes later.

On the power play with Colborne in the penalty box for holding, Jason Spezza toe-dragged the puck around a sliding Kris Russell before feeding Benn for a tap-in at 10:47 to give Dallas a 2-0 lead.

But Gaudreau converted on a tic-tac-toe play set up by Jiri Hudler and Monahan at 12:44 and Deryk Engelland, with a seeing-eye shot through a screen, scored his first goal with the Flames to tie the game at 13:49.

Skating 4-on-4, Shawn Horcoff stripped Bouma at the Stars blue line before hauling the puck up ice on a 2-on-1. Horcoff slid a pass across to Hemsky, who scored on a wraparound to make it 3-2. It was his 11th of the season.

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