In his first game back after an illness that kept him out of the last two games, Patrik Laine returned to be the hero once more by scoring the winning shoot-out goal tonight against the New Jersey Devils in a 4-3 shootout win that was a make-up from originally being postponed March 15.
The Jets should have handled the Devils on this night better than they did. They really should not have had as much trouble handling them as the Devils are in the bottom one-third of the league. Then again, so are the Jets, so...
But, as it was, the Jets came back from a 3-1 deficit after Nikolaj Ehlers opened the scoring 52 seconds in with his 23rd.
After the Devils scored three straight from Beau Bennett, Taylor Hall and Stefan Noesen, the Jets tied it up in the third on a short-handed goal from Joel Armia (his ninth) just 40 seconds into a Devil's power-play after dancing around two Devil's defenders and letting go a a laser of a wrist shot from the face-off circle.
After nothing was solved in overtime, the two teams went to the shootout, where Patrik Laine scored as the fourth shooter in the first round to end it through the five-hole of Cory Schneider.
Laine remains just one behind Austen Matthews for both the NHL rookie goal-scoring, and points lead. If the NHL allowed players who at least scored the winning goal in a shoot-out to be credited with a goal in their stats, Laine would have at least two extra goals.
And about that. Why doesn't the league allow that? If the game ended 4-3, someone had to have scored the winner. I'm not talking about two or three goals in a shoot-out, just the winner. Makes sense, doesn't it?
