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Brind'Amour tallies twice as Hurricanes roll

Nov 11, 2007 - 5:10 AM By Phil Foley PA SportsTicker Contributing Writer

ATLANTA (Ticker) -- In a contest between the league's best offense and its worst defense, the Carolina Hurricanes prevailed.

Rod Brind'Amour scored two goals and Cam Ward turned aside 32 shots to lead the Hurricanes to a 5-3 win over the Atlanta Thrashers on Saturday.

Two years removed from hoisting the Stanley Cup, the high-powered Hurricanes appear to be back on track this season, entering the game with a league-leading 59 goals in 17 games.

Meanwhile the Thrashers, who wrested the Southeast Division crown from the Hurricanes last season, have had the league's most porous defense, allowing an average of 3.64 goals per contest entering Saturday night.

It came as no surprise that Carolina's blistering offensive attack won the battle.

Brind'Amour snapped a 2-2 tie and gave the Hurricanes the lead for good by blasting a one-timer from the inner edge of the left faceoff circle off a feed from Ray Whitney past rookie goaltender Ondrej Pavelec at 7:44 of the second period.

"You don't worry about who's in net," Brind'Amour said. "If you made good-enough shots, some of them are going to go in, regardless of who's in goal."

Despite being unhappy with allowing the goals, Pavelec was honored to be facing Brind'Amour.

"It's a special time for me to be playing against him," said the 20-year-old Pavelec, who was in diapers when Carolina's captain made his NHL debut with St. Louis in the 1989 Stanley Cup playoffs. "All my life, I've been watching those guys on TV."

Ward was solid in net, making 11 saves in the first period, eight in the second and 13 in the third to improve to 6-3-0 lifetime against the Thrashers.

"It was a game where goaltending was the difference," Brind'Amour said. "Cam made some key saves at some key times."

Ward came up huge in the final session, robbing Marian Hossa on a breakaway midway through the third.

"I tried to do the best I could to stay patient," Ward said of the save. "He came in a little bit slow and tried to find the five-hole, and I was able to get a pad on it."

"(Ward) shut the door for them," Atlanta's Eric Perrin said. "He made some huge saves on a couple of breakaways and kept them in the game, for sure."

Perrin got the Thrashers on the board 2:33 into the contest when he received a pass from behind the net by Vyacheslav Kozlov and beat Ward for a 1-0 lead.

The Hurricanes tied the game thanks to a little bit of luck. After Atlanta defenseman Alexei Zhitnik was whistled for tripping at 17:54 of the first period, Carolina benefited from a fortuitous bounce in front of Pavelec.

The puck bounced off blue-liner Tobias Enstrom's skate and onto the stick of Brind'Amour, who tapped it in from alone on the left side with 6.4 seconds remaining in the period.

Hossa gave Atlanta a 2-1 edge with a shorthanded goal at 4:47 of the middle session. Perrin grittily beat the Hurricanes down the ice and grabbed the puck behind the net before feeding Hossa, who cut across the slot and slid it into a vacant net.

Carolina's power-play unit, which entered as the second-best in the league, cashed in a second time when Justin Williams tipped Eric Staal's wrist shot from the right circle past Pavelec to tie the contest just 31 seconds later.

"When they scored the shorthanded goal, I thought it was great that we answered back right away," Hurricanes coach Peter Laviolette said. "That, to me, was the turning point, to get back right away."

It was the league-leading 25th power-play goal allowed by Atlanta's woeful penalty-killing unit, which entered Saturday last in the league.

Cory Stillman poked in a loose puck at 2:58 of the third period to give the Hurricanes a two-goal cushion before Hossa was credited with a goal when his attempted pass from the right corner bounced off Ward and into the net at 5:13 to draw the Thrashers within 4-3.

The 28-year-old Hossa had a chance to tie the game and notch his first hat trick of the season but was stymied by Ward on a breakaway several minutes later.

Pavelec stopped 34 shots for the Thrashers, who had won three in a row and five of six.

"Carolina is the best team in the league," said Pavelec, who lost for the first time in four career starts. "The two power-play goals they scored were lucky goals. You can't win every game, though."

Ilya Kovalchuk had his four-game goal-scoring streak snapped.