With the game tied 3-3 in overtime, Nick Foligno stole the puck from Buffalo’s Jack Eichel at the back boards and passed out to Alexandre Texier skating free through the right circle. The rookie 20-year-old sealed the first win of the season for the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Texier’s snap-shot past Linus Ullmark 2 minutes, 8 seconds into overtime on Monday lifted Columbus to a 4-3 win over Buffalo. It also gave the Blue Jackets a much-needed shot of confidence after losing their first two games by a combined score of 10-3.
“[Foligno] came out with the puck — he did a great job,” Texier said. “I was alone in the middle.”
Photo: AFP
After going up 2-0 in the first period, Columbus let the Sabres back in. With the Blue Jackets leading 3-2 late, Buffalo pulled their goalie on a power play to create a six-on-four advantage and got a goal from Victor Olofsson to tie the score.
That set the stage for Texier’s heroics.
“Well deserved,” Columbus coach John Tortorella said. “He was probably our best forward, our most consistent forward tonight.”
“To win it this way, I think it gives you some juice,” he said.
Foligno, Oliver Bjorkstrand and Cam Atkinson also scored for the Blue Jackets, who outshot Buffalo 44-18.
Joonas Korpisalo had 15 saves.
Marcus Johansson and Jeff Skinner added goals for Buffalo, while Ullmark, making his first start of the season, had 40 saves.
“We’ve just got recharge, be a little bit sour about the loss today,” Ullmark said. “It’s going to be a new day tomorrow. There’s nothing else to it.”
It was the first loss of the season for Buffalo.
“After a couple of games where everything went our way, we struggled to find our game, especially in the first period,” Buffalo coach Ralph Krueger said. “Linus [Ullmark] gave us a chance. We still showed character tonight to come back from two down, thanks to Linus buying us some time.”
“The second period showed fight, and the willingness to try to fix a night that’s difficult and get used to playing some close games, because we’re going to have a lot this year,” Krueger added.
In Toronto, Alex Pietrangelo scored the tie-breaking goal in the third period, leading defending champions the Blues to a 3-2 victory over the Maple Leafs.
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