Stars score 4 unanswered goals to rally past Canadiens
Johnston's game winner with 5 minutes left marks 3rd power-play goal for Dallas
Wyatt Johnston scored Dallas' third power-play goal with five minutes remaining and the Stars rallied past the Montreal Canadiens 4-2 at home on Friday night.
Johnston put his own rebound past Jake Allen, giving the rookie a three-game goal streak. At 19 years and 223 days old, he's the youngest Dallas player to score in three consecutive games.
"[Ryan Suter] made a pretty perfect pass to me in the slot," said Johnston, whose 10 goals are tied for second-most among NHL rookies. "Just tried to get a shot off on net. It got blocked and I got a pretty lucky bounce and it came right back to me and just had to put it in the open net."
WATCH | Johnston delivers on power play:
Fourth-line forwards Jake Evans and Michael Pezzetta scored for the Canadiens, who have lost five of six (1-4-1). Allen stopped 32 shots.
Montreal has played the first three of seven consecutive road games.
Dallas wins special teams battle
The Stars went 5 for 8 on the power play in sweeping the two-game season series, including a 5-2 win at Montreal on Oct. 22.
Was that a result of Dallas' attack or Montreal's penalty killers struggling?
"A little bit of both," Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis said.
The Canadiens, coming in at 13.6 per cent on the power play, had only one power-play goal on 30 chances in their previous nine games. Evans' goal came against the league's No. 4 penalty kill at 83.1 per cent.
Pezzetta, who returned to the lineup after being a healthy scratch for two games, whistled a wrist shot off Oettinger's stick and the crossbar to give Montreal a 2-0 lead at 2:24 of the second period.
Pezzetta, with an assist on Evans' goal, had the first multipoint game of his two-year NHL career.
Robertson impresses
Hintz pulled the Stars to 2-1 at 15:19 of the second. Dallas tied it 2-all at 2:27 of the third on the same sequence — Hintz in the slot deflecting a shot by Robertson on the power play.
"[Robertson] has a computer in his head," Hintz said.
"When the puck is on [Robertson's] stick, something good is usually going to happen," Dallas coach Peter DeBoer said.
Montreal's unlikely source of goals came on a night when St. Louis placed the team's top two scorers, Cole Caufield (19 goals, 28 points) and Nick Suzuki (15 goals, 31 points), on different lines.
Caufield had two shots on goal with three blocked, and Suzuki had no shots on goal.
"A little bit of an experiment," St. Louis said. "We'll see where it takes us."
