The San Jose Sharks ran their winning streak to four games and continued their push for a playoff spot with a 4-1 victory over the visiting Toronto Maple Leafs on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Zack Ostapchuk, Collin Graf, William Eklund and Adam Gaudette all scored for the Sharks (36-31-7, 79 points), who moved into the Western Conference\u2019s second wild-card spot pending the result of the late game between the Los Angeles Kings and Nashville Predators.<\/p>\n
Goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic made 18 saves.<\/p>\n
San Jose has won the first three outings of a six-game homestand.<\/p>\n
John Tavares scored for the Maple Leafs (32-31-13, 77 points), who have dropped two of three games on their four-game road trip that concludes in Los Angeles on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Goalie Anthony Stolarz stopped 21 shots.<\/p>\n
The Sharks have been known for their late goals in recent outings, but opened the scoring when Ostapchuk converted with a long wrist shot on a 1-on-1 rush at the 3:27 mark to snap a 26-game goal-scoring drought<\/p>\n
Graf doubled the lead late in the frame with his 20th of the season. Tyler Toffoli forced a turnover that led to Michael Misa\u2019s drop pass to Graf, who buried a quick shot at 17:43 of the clash.<\/p>\n
Eklund extended San Jose\u2019s lead with a fortunate bounce 1:42 into the second period. Off a rush, his long shot went wide of the net, but bounced off the end boards and off Stolarz\u2019s foot before going into the cage.<\/p>\n
Tavares put the Maple Leafs on the board with a power-play goal five minutes later, netting a shot off the rush seconds after Stolarz made a sprawling save at the other end.<\/p>\n
Toronto continued to push in the third period but Gaudette\u2019s empty-net goal in the final minute of regulation time sealed the victory.<\/p>\n
The loss was a double disappointment for the visitors. Toronto defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson left the game early in the second period due to a lower-body injury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The San Jose Sharks ran their winning streak to four games and continued their push for a playoff…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538002,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5127],"tags":[5,4,519,168,5306,5305,1780],"class_list":{"0":"post-538001","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-jose-sharks","8":"tag-hockey","9":"tag-nhl","10":"tag-san-jose","11":"tag-san-jose-sharks","12":"tag-sanjose","13":"tag-sanjosesharks","14":"tag-sharks"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116339225811807618","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}