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Liles lifts Avalanche past Oilers

Mar 15, 2009 - 5:41 AM EDMONTON, Alberta (Ticker) -- The Colorado Avalanche played the spoiler role to perfection, though that's not the way they look at it.

John-Michael Liles scored 42 seconds into overtime to give the Avalanche a 3-2 victory over the Edmonton Oilers on Saturday night.

"We're not looking at it as being spoilers right now, we're just looking to win as many games as we can," Colorado coach Tony Granato said.

Darcy Tucker and Paul Stastny also scored for the Avalanche, coming off a win over the playoff-contending Minnesota Wild on Thursday night. With the victory, Colorado moved out of the Western Conference basement - a point ahead of Phoenix.

"We're not worried about who we are playing or where they are in the standings," Granato said. "We're worried about wining the games and still trying to climb as high as we can and play as hard as we can all the way to the end."

Robert Nilsson and Sheldon Souray scored for Edmonton. The Oilers lost for the third straight time in overtime to drop from seventh to a tie for eighth with Nashville in the Western Conference.

"It was just a missed opportunity early," Oilers coach Craig MacTavish said. "We had a great opportunity to win the game early, but after that it was just poor playmaking. We didn't make enough plays from breakouts on through. And the faceoffs, it's hard to sustain anything when you can't win those.

"It's a point, but it wasn't a great effort."

Nilsson opened the scoring for Edmonton at 3:09 of the first period, and Tucker tied it on a power play with 4:58 left in the period. Stastny added a power-play goal at 4:20 of the third, and Souray tied it with 5:20 left in regulation.