Flames extend point streak to 9 despite dropping OT decision to Stars
Calgary's NIkita Zadorov scores late in 3rd to push game to extra time
Defenceman Miro Heiskanen continued his breakout season with a three-point game for the Dallas Stars in 4-3 overtime win over the Calgary Flames on Thursday.
Jamie Benn scored the overtime winner. Heiskanen's three assists were his second three-point game in as many weeks and the third of his career.
Benn collected a drop pass from Joe Pavelski and sent a shot just inside the goal post on Flames goalie Jacob Markstrom at 2:59 of extra time.
"Just a simple cross and drop," Benn said. "We've been trying to work on things for 3-on-3 overtime. Just worked out."
Denis Gurianov, Blake Comeau and Tyler Seguin also scored for Dallas (4-4-2) as the Stars snapped a four-game winless skid.
Dallas has earned three of four possible points on their road trip, which concludes Sunday in Vancouver against the Canucks.
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Milan Lucic, Matthew Tkachuk and Nikita Zadorov replied for Calgary (6-1-3), which extended its points streak to nine games (6-0-3).
Stars goalie Anton Khudobin made 30 stops for Dallas to improve to 2-1-1. At the other end, Markstrom had 24 saves and was 4-1-3.
Heiskanen did all his damage in regulation time starting with a perfect diagonal pass through the slot that was steered in by Gurianov to give Dallas a 1-0 lead in the first period.
"I got lots of space there and saw Denis was driving to the net and just tried to shoot it hard to his tape," Heiskanen said.
He also was in on Comeau's goal that tied the game 2-2 with six seconds left in the second period, as well as Seguin's goal 1:34 into the third when the Stars regained the lead.
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The 22-year-old Heiskanen leads the Stars in scoring with 10 points (two goals, eight assists). He's one point back of a group of the top-scoring defencemen in the league — Kevin Shattenkirk, Roman Josi, and Adam Fox.
"He's taking his game to the next level," Benn said. "Am I surprised? No. Do we expect it every night? It's hard to do that every night for 82 games, but he's pretty close to it."
The young Finn's career-high for points in an NHL season is 35, which happened in his second season in the league in 2019-20. He's on pace to shatter that mark.
"What are you going to say about the kid? Tough to even keep calling him a kid," Seguin said. "He's just dominant. Fun to watch, fun to play with."
Consecutive overtime losses left the Flames 1-0-2 in a five-game homestand that continues Saturday against the New York Rangers.
"We had some guys . . . when you don't have your A game, you better have a good B game. Some guys tonight didn't have either," said Flames coach Darryl Sutter.
"We're not going to win unless everybody is on top of their game."
Down 3-2 in the third, the unlikeliest of scorers tied the game for the Flames at 16:03.
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Zadorov got the puck at the blueline during a four-on-four and fired a shot through a screen that beat Khudobin. It was the defenceman's first goal in 37 games dating back to Feb. 28 of last season.
"What's nice to see is that we're competing till the end of the game. We're not getting away from our game," Lucic said. "We're sticking with it and we're getting ourselves back into games."
Zadorov's goal came 15 seconds after the Flames had their power play cut short by Markstrom, who was penalized for playing the puck in the trapezoid.
"You look at last year, we didn't get these points at all," Lucic said. "We're competing to the end of the shift, to the end of the period, and clearly to the end of the game. We're a group that has a lot of pride."
