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Salavat Yulaev eases past Lada. February 1 round-up
A flurry of goals early in the second period set Salavat Yulaev on the way to a sixth win in seven games. Lada missed out on a chance to break into the top four after falling to a second successive loss, while Ufa remains third in the standings, now two points behind Avangard in the Eastern Conference.
Salavat Yulaev Ufa 5 Lada Togliatti 2 (1-1, 4-0, 0-1)
The home team had the better of the game from the start. Throughout the first period, Salavat Yulaev put more pressure on the Lada net and frequently threatened goals. However, the visitor found that a single counterattack was enough to open the scoring after all that pressure. An odd-man rush saw Sergei Shumakov fire the Motormen in front in the 12th minute.
It didn’t take long for Ufa to equalize. Yaroslav Tsulygin’s shot rebounded off the boards and Daniil Ogirchuk was waiting on the slot to put the puck into the net. It remained level through the first 20 minutes.
In the middle frame, the host got the goals its efforts deserved. Lada ran into penalty trouble from the start of the session, and Josh Leivo made it 2-1 with a power play goal. A couple of minutes later, it was 3-1 – Danil Alalykin conjuring up the latest KHL lacrosse goal, a week after Maxim Shabanov’ pulled off a similar move for Traktor.
That was something of a gamebreaker, and Lada never recovered. In the 28th minute, Leivo turned provider as Alexander Chmelevski added a fourth. Then, seconds before the intermission, Alexei Vasilevsky made it 5-1 and put the game out of the visitor’s grasp.
Lada managed to get one back in the third: Evgeny Groshev potted a short-handed effort to make it 2-5 with six minutes to play. That’s Lada’s 11th short-handed goal of the season, second only to Dinamo Minsk in the KHL. However, that was as close as the visitor came to threatening a fightback as Salavat Yulaev eased to victory.
