CHICAGO — All that tinkering with the power play, all the practice time and the tweaked combinations finally paid off for the Blackhawks when they needed it most.
Jonathan Toews and Andrew Shaw scored with the man advantage in the second period, and Chicago avoided elimination with a 4-1 victory over the Red Wings last night in Game 5 of the second-round playoff series.
Shaw added his third career playoff goal in the third as the Blackhawks stopped the Red Wings’ three-game winning streak by creating chaos in front of Jimmy Howard, who had shut down Chicago’s attack while moving Detroit to the brink of the Western Conference finals.
With the sellout crowd chanting “Ho-ward! Ho-ward!” in an attempt to shake him, the standout goalie made 41 saves in another solid performance. But the Blackhawks created enough quality chances that he simply couldn’t stop all of them.
“Good things come from shooting the puck,” Shaw said. “There’s rebounds, there’s loose pucks, and we had all guys converging to the net and we just kept picking them up and hemming them in there and tired them out and we were rewarded.”
Bryan Bickell scored the first goal of the game and Corey Crawford had 25 stops for Chicago, which managed only two goals during its first three-game losing streak of the season.
Daniel Cleary scored for the second straight game for Detroit, which will have another chance to close out the top-seeded Blackhawks in Game 6 tomorrow night. That will be at home, too, where the Red Wings are 4-1 in this postseason.