The Detroit Red Wings finally broke through on the power play. Henrik Zetterberg had two goals and an assist, and Pavel Datsyuk and Niklas Kronwall each had a goal and two assists to lead Detroit in a 5-2 win against the Philadelphia Flyers at Joe Louis Arena on Saturday night. Todd Bertuzzi also scored for Detroit, which had three power-play goals to snap its 0-for-10 season-opening man-advantage skid. Daniel Alfredsson had three assists and Jimmy Howard made 32 saves. Bertuzzi opened the scoring, with the Red Wings' first power-play goal of the season, 7:13 into the game. He put a wraparound effort past Ray Emery for Bertuzzi's first goal, just 24 seconds after Michael Raffl went off for hooking.
"That was huge. We got one, Bert just got
it done on his own, I think it loosened the guys up and after that we
were able to move the puck and get pucks back," Detroit
coach Mike Babcock said. "So that was a real positive thing
for us. You need your scorers to score to win games. But they got to
get their confidence and in order to do that you got to score a
little bit so this should be a good thing for us."
Babcock moved Bertuzzi up to the first line for
the game along with Datsyuk and Zetterberg.
"I thought we entered the zone pretty
good, we moved the puck around quite a bit and most important thing,
we shot the puck," Bertuzzi said. "We got the puck
to the net and we had traffic around there and we had some good
plays, that was the key, moving it and getting as many shots as we
can."
Erik
Gustafsson and Tye
McGinn scored for Philadelphia and Emery
stopped 25 shots. Flyers interim coach Craig Berube dropped to 1-2-0
since replacing Peter Laviolette on Monday.
"You don't ever want to get comfortable
with losing," Berube said. "But we played a solid
game, a lot of urgency. We were competitive, but it wasn't enough."
Kronwall's power-play goal with 8:52 left in the
second period gave Detroit a 2-0 lead. Kronwall's first goal of the
season came on a wrist shot from the left circle. Gustafsson put
Philadelphia on the board just 34 seconds later when his floating
wrist shot from the right point bounced in front of Howard and found
its way into the net.
"I just kind of threw it at the net and it
was almost there and I got the good bounce," Gustafsson
said.
Datsyuk restored the two-goal lead with his
power-play goal 3:08 into the third period, beating Emery with a
backhand shot from the slot that was screened by Bertuzzi. McGinn
made it 3-2 with his first NHL goal, 2:38 later. He backhanded a
rebound in from the slot after being called up from the minors
earlier in the day. Zetterberg scored with 6:12 remaining and added
an empty-netter in the final minute.
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