{"id":538115,"date":"2026-04-03T07:03:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T07:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/538115\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T07:03:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T07:03:12","slug":"sharks-win-again-defeat-maple-leafs-to-move-into-2nd-wild-card-in-west-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/538115\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharks win again, defeat Maple Leafs to move into 2nd wild card in West"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Eklund put the Sharks up 3-0 at 1:42 of the second period. Eklund took a pass from Wennberg at the top of the right face-off circle, and despite his shot going wide of the net, the puck bounced back off the end boards and hit Stolarz&#8217;s left pad to cross the goal line.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s been the theme of my year, a little bit. Creating a lot of chances, but can&#8217;t get the puck in,&#8221; Eklund said. &#8220;It&#8217;s nice to get a bounce.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Tavares scored a power-play goal to cut it to 3-1 at 6:43. While on a 3-on-2,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nhl.com\/player\/easton-cowan-8484158\" title=\"Easton Cowan\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Easton Cowan<\/a>\u00a0passed to Tavares at the left dot, and his snap shot beat Nedeljkovic over the blocker.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I thought our puck play wasn&#8217;t quite as sharp as it was the other night. That competitiveness to raise your game was pretty (much) there,&#8221; Tavares said.<\/p>\n<p>Gaudette scored an empty-net goal at 19:03 of the third period for the 4-1 final.<\/p>\n<p>NOTES: The Sharks recorded their second winning streak of four games this season. The last time they had a longer run was Nov. 5-16, 2019 (6-0-0). &#8230; The Sharks have a total of 135 points from players age 19 or younger in 2025-26, which is the sixth-most in a single season in NHL history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eklund put the Sharks up 3-0 at 1:42 of the second period. Eklund took a pass from Wennberg&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5106],"tags":[5,20,5172,4,66,31,5171],"class_list":{"0":"post-538115","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-toronto-maple-leafs","8":"tag-hockey","9":"tag-maple-leafs","10":"tag-mapleleafs","11":"tag-nhl","12":"tag-toronto","13":"tag-toronto-maple-leafs","14":"tag-torontomapleleafs"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116339500956135771","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538115","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=538115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}