Lekkerimaki's Two Late Goals Force OT, Hronek Ends It
Vancouver trailed 5-2 with under nine minutes left in regulation and still won. Jonathan Lekkerimaki scored twice in 49 seconds to tie it, and Filip Hronek's overtime slap shot sent the Canucks home with a 6-5 victory.
Anaheim looked like it had this one locked up. A.J. Greer opened the scoring late in the first with a wrist shot off assists from Jackson LaCombe and Sam Colangelo, and the Ducks spent the second period turning a 1-1 tie into a 4-1 rout. Jeff Malott tipped one home 30 seconds after Vancouver knotted it, then Beckett Sennecke deflected in his seventh of the year, and Leo Carlsson capped the second-period surge with a wrist shot at 18:24. Anaheim carried a three-goal lead into the third and then made it four when Greer tipped in his second of the night at 12:23 — his fourth goal of the season — with LaCombe picking up his third assist of the game. At that point, a Vancouver comeback looked like a long shot.
What followed was one of the stranger third periods you'll see. Brock Boeser got Vancouver on the board at 11:40 with an unassisted deflection, then Jamie Oleksiak hammered a slap shot past Lukas Dostal at 12:54 — assisted by Boeser and Elias Pettersson — to make it 5-3. Then Lekkerimaki took over. At 17:14 he beat Dostal with a wrist shot, unassisted, to cut it to 5-4. Forty-nine seconds later, he snapped home his sixth of the season — set up by Pettersson and Filip Hronek — to tie the game at five. Dostal finished with 27 saves on 33 shots; the math on the final six minutes of regulation was not kind to him.
In overtime, Hronek ended it at 4:49 with a slap shot, assisted by Boeser and Lekkerimaki, for his first goal of the season. Lekkerimaki finished with 2 goals and 1 assist for 3 points; Boeser added 1 goal and 2 assists; LaCombe had 3 assists in a losing effort. On the Vancouver side, Leevi Merilainen stopped 18 of 23 shots — hardly a dominant performance, but it was enough. The story of the night was clearly the Canucks' refusal to fold when down three goals in the third. That matters beyond this game: according to Yahoo Sports, Vancouver was one game away from matching last season's 11-game winless streak heading into tonight. This win, however ugly the path, stops that conversation — at least for now.