VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Tyler Myers scored midway through the third period, leading the Vancouver Canucks to a 2-1 win over the Edmonton Oilers on Saturday night.
Bo Horvat also scored for the Canucks (12-17-2), shoveling the puck in on a power play in the second period.
Horvat said his goal was anything but a thing of beauty.
“Probably one of (the ugliest I’ve scored) but I guess they don’t ask how,” he said. “It was a good collective effort to get that puck in the net.”
Leon Draisaitl scored for the for the Oilers (19-11-0), collecting his 16th goal of the season.
Edmonton's Mikko Koskinen had 26 saves. Thatcher Demko stopped 34 of 35 shots for Vancouver.
Edmonton had its four-game win streak halted and slipped to third place in the North Division behind Winnipeg, a 5-2 winner Saturday over the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Vancouver has won five of seven.
Edmonton caught a late break when Vancouver’s Tanner Pearson was called for hooking with 2:30 left in the game.
The Oilers pulled Koskinen with 1:45 to go and called a 30-second timeout to plan their attack, but they couldn’t beat Demko.
Demko stopped five shots in the final penalty to collect his ninth win of the season.
Myers put the Canucks up 2-1 with just over 10 minutes left, sending a shot over Koskinen’s stick from the top of the left circle. It was the defenseman’s 300th point in the NHL.
The Canucks broke a scoreless stalemate 12:59 into the second with a power-play goal.
Koskinen stopped a long blast from J.T. Miller but couldn’t corral the rebound, and several players battled for the loose puck. With bodies littering the crease, Horvat poked the loose puck over the goal line from the side of the net.
“It was all pretty much a blur,” Horvat said. “Obviously the shot came from (Miller) and Tanner (Pearson) was jamming at the rebound and I just wanted to get my stick in there and I saw it for a split second and just tried to keep jamming away at it and thankfully it went in.”
Canucks coach Travis Green said the effort his team showed on the play was exactly the kind of game Vancouver wanted to play on Saturday.
“It doesn’t have to be pretty. You just got to get the puck across the line,” he said. “When you’re not scoring, being hard at both nets is key. If you want to score, get to the paint.”
There was no call for a review of the play.
“I’ve been around the game a long time and eight or nine out of 10 times, that gets blown down. I guess tonight it wasn’t,” said Oilers coach Dave Tippett. “They said it wasn’t covered up and it banged around there and ended up in our net.”
Edmonton responded with a power-play goal of its own four minutes later.
The Canucks had just finished killing off 23 seconds of 5-on-3 and were working to whittle down the remaining penalty when Draisaitl sent a shot screaming into the Vancouver net from the bottom of the faceoff circle.
The goal extended Draisaitl's point streak to six games (six goals, five assists).
Draisaitl said Edmonton played really well for the most part on Saturday.
“We dipped a little bit in the third for a couple of minutes, but other than that, I thought we were the better team,” he said. “But sometimes that’s just the way it goes. We had games this year, probably, where were weren’t the better team and we won. So we’ve just got to regroup.”
The Oilers were 1 for 4 with the man advantage on Saturday. The Canucks went 1 for 2 on the power play.
NOTES: Connor McDavid assist on Draisaitl’s power-play goal extended his point streak to five games. The Oilers' captain has three goals and nine assists in the stretch. … The Oilers came into the game having topped the Sens 6-2 on Friday. Saturday’s result marked Edmonton’s first loss in the second-half of a back-to-back this season.
UP NEXT
Oilers: At Calgary on Monday and Wednesday nights.
Canucks: At Ottawa on Monday and Wednesday nights.
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