Kyle Connor scored twice on Friday as the Winnipeg Jets beat the Toronto Maple Leafs 4-2 in the regular-season finale for both teams.
Mason Appleton and Jansen Harkins, with an empty-netter, also scored, while Connor Hellebuyck made 34 saves to help the Jets finish 30-23-3.
Pierre Engvall and Ilya Mikheyev scored, while Jack Campbell stopped 20 shots for North Division champions Toronto.
Photo: AP
The Maple Leafs finished 35-14-7.
Toronto gave forward Mitch Marner the night off, with Adam Brooks taking his spot on a line with Auston Matthews and Alex Galchenyuk.
The game meant little as both teams already have their first-round playoff matches set.
The Jets start their first-round series with the Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday in Edmonton, while the Maple Leafs welcome Montreal Canadiens for game 1 on Thursday — the first post-season meeting between the Original Six rivals since 1979.
Meanwhile, by the time the Calgary Flames and Vancouver Canucks end their seasons, the Washington Capitals and Boston Bruins will be well into the first round of their playoff series.
In another bizarre anomaly in an NHL season with a COVID-19 backdrop, Calgary and Vancouver are to play each other three times next week, while every other team in the league is either squaring off in the post-season or already done for the year.
Neither the Flames nor the Canucks made the playoffs and the results of their three games will only count toward where the clubs rank in the entry draft lottery.
The Flames-Canucks games were put off earlier this season when a COVID-19 outbreak hit Vancucer and paused the team’s schedule for three weeks. So an NHL season that was originally going to end on Saturday last week is to finish with back-to-back meetings of the Canucks and Flames on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Playing out the string while other teams have already embarked on their Stanley Cup quest will be weird, Flames forward Milan Lucic said.
“Yes. Yes it will. Especially when they’re meaningless games,” The Canadian Press quoted him as saying.
“With COVID, it’s a unique year. With the shutdown that happened in Vancouver, we knew this was a possibility for a while now,” Flames captain Mark Giordano said. “The league really doesn’t have much of a choice with the time frame.”
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
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