Red Wings 3 Rangers 1
NEW YORK — Chris Osgood has 395 NHL wins, three Stanley Cup rings, and now a regular seat on the Detroit Red Wings bench.
Say hello to rookie Jimmy Howard, who is quickly becoming the No. 1 goalie for the defending Western Conference champions.
Howard made 28 saves — including a penalty-shot stop and another denial on a breakaway — and kept the New York Rangers at bay long enough to give the Red Wings a 3-1 victory Sunday night.
“Howie was good,” Red Wings coach Mike Babcock said. “He mentally battled and he hung in and he is going to start next game against St. Louis.”
Those assignments over the 37-year-old Osgood are no longer surprising.
Howard has started five of Detroit’s past seven games and has earned three wins. He is 8-5-1 this season with a 2.55 goals-against average.
Keeping scoring down is even more important than usual for Detroit, which has struggled to find offence while missing injured players Johan Franzen, Valtteri Filppula, Jason Williams, Niklas Kronwall and Andreas Lilja.
Dan Cleary snapped a 1-1 tie with 2:03 left to give the Red Wings three of a possible four points in weekend games at New Jersey and New York.
The Red Wings shook off an early 1-0 deficit and won this matchup between Original Six teams.
“When you have a lot of guys out, you have to focus on playing well defensively,” captain Nicklas Lidstrom said.
“You can’t open yourself up defensively because goals are so hard to get in this league now.
“We did an excellent job in front of Howie. He made the saves when we needed, but I thought we played really well defensively in front of him, too.”
After Marian Gaborik failed to control the puck and get off a shot in the Detroit end, Lidstrom started a rush the other way. Henrik Zetterberg sent a pass to Cleary, who banked in a shot from the goal line off the skate of goalie Henrik Lundqvist for his seventh.
“I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t really see it in front of me,” Lundqvist said.
“I was expecting a shot earlier, and then I just went far down and I kind of got stuck there. It is a tough one to let in that late.”
Detroit, which rallied from two goals down in front of Osgood before losing in a shootout on Saturday, also got goals from Pavel Datsyuk and Kris Draper, into an empty net. The Red Wings have won three of five (3-1-1).
Senators 4,
Ducks 3 (SO)
ANAHEIM, Calif. — The Ottawa Senators didn’t get much time to enjoy any of their leads in regulation.
The Senators gave up three one-goal leads — in less than a minute each time — before Alex Kovalev and Daniel Alfredsson scored in the first two rounds of a shootout to lift Ottawa to a 4-3 victory over the Anaheim Ducks on Sunday night and snap a four-game losing streak.
Ryan Getzlaf scored a fluke goal for Anaheim 15 seconds after Jarkko Ruutu got one, Joffrey Lupul tied it again 31 seconds after Jason Spezza regained the lead for the Senators during a power play, and Corey Perry tied again early in the third period — 50 seconds after Filip Kuba’s go-ahead score.
Ottawa goalie Brian Elliott finished with 33 saves and stopped two of three shots in the tiebreaker, helping send Anaheim to its fifth straight loss and salvage the finale of a five-game road trip that began with a shootout loss against Boston.