WESTERN SEMI-FINALS
GAME SUMMARIES
GAME 1:
#1 DALLAS STARS vs #5 ST. LOUIS BLUES
Dallas leads 1-0
Next Game: Saturday May 8th, 1999 7:30pm at Dallas
Brett Hull won't have to take any more kidding from his teammates. He finally scored a playoff goal for the Dallas Stars and it helped beat his old team, the St. Louis Blues.
Hull and Pat Verbeek scored their first goals of the playoffs and Ed Belfour stopped 23 shots Thursday night as the Stars beat the Blues 3-0 in the first game of their Western Conference semifinal series.
The teams will meet in the second game of the best-of-7 series in Dallas on Saturday night.
"When Brett scored that goal you could see it lifted a burden off his shoulders," said Dallas coach Ken Hitchcock. "He had been down about the chances he missed. You could see that goal gave him life and made him a different kind of player."
Belfour earned his fifth shutout and 50th career playoff victory by shutting down the leg-weary Blues, who were involved in an exhausting seven-gane series with Phoenix while Dallas was resting for nine days.
Hull scored his first playoff goal for the Stars just 49 seconds into the second period to make it a 2-0 lead. Hull, who played 10 years for St. Louis, skated with the puck to the right circle and unleashed one of his powerful slap shots which Grant Fuhr saw go between his legs into the net.
Hull had been the target of some practical jokes by his teammates during the Dallas vacation that he took good-naturedly, saying "I'd like to score a goal even if it's against a girl's team."
As it turned out it was against the Blues, who lost Hull to Dallas via the free-agent route.
"You're a goal scorer and you haven't scored and you can say it doesn't matter but it does," Hull said. "The puck finally went in for me. I shot it as hard as I could."
Verbeek, who missed the first-round Edmonton series because of a knee injury, celebrated his return by scoring a first-period goal.
Joe Nieuwendyk, who has two game-winning playoff goals for the Stars, split two St. Louis defenders at midice and rifled a shot at Fuhr, who made the save only to see Verbeek slap home the rebound to give Dallas a 1-0 lead.
"That goal relaxed me for the rest of the game," Verbeek said. "The rebound came right to me."
Mike Modano put the game away against the gambling Blues with 31.9 seconds left on an unassisted goal as St. Louis pulled Fuhr from the net after a Dallas penalty for a six-on-four attack.
Dallas couldn't convert on seven power-play attempts while St. Louis had five chances with the extra man without converting.
"We thought Dallas was ripe to be beaten but it looks like we're the ones who got picked off the cherry tree," said Blues coach Joel Quenneville. "Belfour was very sharp."
Al MacInnis said the Blues had no defense for their play.
"We can't use being tired as an excuse," he said.
Pierre Turgeon of the Blues suffered a knee injury late in the game when he was slashed from behind by Verbeek, but expects to play on Saturday.
"That Verbeek slash was pretty vicious," Quenneville said. "Verbeek looked like he knew what he was doing."
"I lost feeling in my leg and we'll see how it feels later," Turgeon said.
St. Louis' Jamal Mayers exacted some revenge right after the faceoff following Modano's goal by hacking Dallas defenseman Darryl Sydor in the arm. Mayers was given a two-minute slashing penalty.
Dallas swept Edmonton in four games to advance to the second round while St. Louis was extended to seven games against Phoenix by winning three games in a row. Dallas held a 2-1-1 edge over the Blues in the regular season.
#2 COLORADO AVALANCHE vs #3 DETROIT RED WINGS
Detroit leads 1-0
Next Game: Sunday May 9th, 1999 2pm at Colorado
In a game that matched talent-laden teams on both sides, it was a goalie who wasn't expected to play and a forward who hadn't scored a point in the playoffs who made the biggest impacts.
Bill Ranford had 37 saves and Kirk Maltby scored 4:18 into overtime, lifting the Detroit Red Wings to a 3-2 victory over Colorado in the opening game of their second-round playoff series Friday night.
Ranford, who started in goal in place of the injured Chris Osgood (sprained right knee), was outstanding, particularly in the third period when he made 16 saves, several of the acrobatic variety.
Maltby, stationed just right of the goal, took a pass from Kris Draper behind the net and put it past Patrick Roy to give the Red Wings their fifth consecutive win in the postseason after a first-round sweep of Anaheim.
Both teams survived five-minute penalties against them, but the Avalanche couldn't overcome the loss of their best player, Peter Forsberg, who was assessed a game misconduct late in the second period.
Roy finished with 31 saves.
Game 2 is scheduled in Denver on Sunday.
"I learned this morning," Ranford said of coach Scotty Bowman's decision to start him. "Ozzie is doing better every day, but they decided to give him a couple more days of rest.
"When you haven't played for three-plus weeks, I tried not to get too wound up in the game early on. I got my feet underneath me as the game went on. The fatigue factor was a big concern, but I just tried to shut that out."
Ranford, the league's playoff MVP while with Edmonton in 1990, was acquired by Detroit from Tampa Bay on March 23 but hadn't played since the Red Wings' next-to-last regular-season game on April 14.
"Billy was great," said Bowman, who recorded his 199th playoff victory -- an NHL record. "Our guys have a lot of confidence in him."
Maltby said he saw Draper "get the puck behind the net and tried to get open for him. I just wanted to get the shot off quickly and toward the net. I was fortunate to get it past Patrick."
Avalanche coach Bob Hartley was upset that similar five-minute boarding penalties against Forsberg and Detroit's Darren McCarty resulted in an ejection of Forsberg, but not McCarty.
Jim Gregory, NHL vice president of hockey operations, said the rules state that an act of boarding that results in an injury to the face or head -- such as Forsberg's hit -- demands an ejection. On McCarty's hit, however, there was no apparent face or head injury.
Forsberg was unavailable for comment after the game.
"It was a disappointing loss because we played well enough to win, we had great intensity and we made good decisions," Hartley said. "But they got the final shot, and it was a great scoring chance."
In a tightly officiated first period that featured eight penalties -- five of them against Colorado -- the Avalanche took a 2-1 lead.
Detroit scored first. After gaining a 5-on-3 advantage for 22 seconds as a result of penalties against Colorado's Adam Foote and Sylvain Lefebvre, Steve Yzerman chipped in a shot from just left of the net at 3:54.
Colorado had its own 5-on-3 advantage for 21 seconds later in the period but couldn't capitalize.
But Theo Fleury tied it on a power play at 10:51, taking a rebound and bouncing the puck off the post from just right of the net.
Less than two minutes later, Colorado's Adam Deadmarsh, fighting off Chris Chelios inside the right circle, redirected a shot from the point by Foote for a go-ahead goal at 12:34.
Detroit made it 2-2 in the second period. Claude Lemieux's apparent goal early in the period was disallowed because of a hand pass. Then at 16:30, Detroit's Vyacheslav Kozlov punched in a rebound of a shot from the right circle by Sergei Fedorov on a power play.
Two minutes later, the Avalanche lost Forsberg, who was assessed a five-minute major for boarding and a game misconduct. Forsberg hit Brendan Shanahan from behind, knocking Shanahan into the glass and opening a cut around his right eye.
Colorado killed off part of that five-minute penalty in the second period, and then killed off the remaining 3:39 in the third period when Detroit managed no serious scoring chances.
At 10:00, McCarty was assessed a five-minute boarding penalty for slamming Lemieux into the boards from behind, leaving a stunned Lemieux lying on the ice for more than a minute.
McCarty's penalty gave Colorado a 5-on-3 advantage for 32 seconds and a 5-on-4 for the next 4:28, but the Wings killed it off, thanks to several outstanding saves by Ranford.