Teammates and friends in the minors, Los Angeles Kings rookies Calvin Peterson and Matt Luff pulled off NHL firsts in the same game.
Peterson on Monday earned his first shutout and Luff scored his first goal, leading the Kings to a 2-0 victory over the St Louis Blues, hours before the Blues fired coach Mike Yeo.
“It’s unreal,” Luff said. “We were talking when I gave him a hug on the ice about that. Couldn’t have picked a better day for it to happen with him getting his first shutout. We talked about it on the plane. He’s probably one of the best kids, so I’m happy it happened for him.”
Photo: AP
Peterson, making his third start for the Kings, stopped 29 shots. He was the 24th rookie goaltender to start a game for Los Angeles.
“On the personal side, to get the shutout was very cool, and for Luffer to get his first [goal] was very cool, too,” Peterson said. “So it was an all-around great night.”
The Kings, last in the Pacific Division, had lost four of their past five games before picking up the win over St Louis in a game featuring teams with the worst records in the Western Conference.
Interim coach Willie Desjardins said it was a good win for the Kings.
“They’re hard to play against,” Desjardins said. “They had a few chances. I thought we played pretty good overall.”
“It’s hard to win if you don’t score goals,” Blues forward Vladimir Tarasenko said. “I have no words. We’re trying hard, maybe too hard. If we don’t score, it’s zero in every game and it’s really frustrating.”
Los Angeles went up 1-0 at 8 minutes, 18 seconds of the second period. Luff scored his first goal on his sixth career shot when he hit a wrister from the right circle.
“It wasn’t a perfect shot, but luckily it went in,” Luff said.
Anze Kopitar added an empty-netter with 30 seconds left.
St Louis general manager Doug Armstrong named Craig Berube as the team’s interim coach.
At 7-9-3, the Blues are in last place in the Central Division and their 17 points rank next-to-last in the NHL, ahead of only Los Angeles.
The 45-year-old Yeo had joined the Blues as an assistant in 2016 after five seasons with Minnesota.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier