By AARON BEARD AP Sports Writer
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Nikolaj Ehlers got loose up the center of the ice and popped the puck past Jakub Dobes at 3:29 of overtime to lift the Carolina Hurricanes past the Montreal Canadiens 3-2 on Saturday night to level the Eastern Conference Final at one game apiece.
Ehlers scored twice for the Eastern Conference’s top seed, the first with a highlight-reel individual effort in the second period against two Montreal defenders.
And when the game went to OT, the guy the Hurricanes landed as a sought-after free agent carried them to the finish line.
The winning sequence started with a retreating Jalen Chatfield bouncing the puck back into the neutral zone to Mark Jankowski, who had a quick redirection to Ehlers entering the zone at full speed for a clean look at Dobes for the winner.
Eric Robinson also scored for Carolina, which was facing massive pressure to regroup from Thursday’s 6-2 loss in the series opener that only magnified the team’s long-running troubles in the Eastern Final.
Now the series shifts to Canada for Monday’s Game 3.
Josh Anderson scored twice for the Canadiens, the second coming at the 12:51 mark of the third period to ultimately force the overtime at 2-2.
The Canadiens won the first game 6-2, jumping on a Carolina team coming off an 11-day break after sweeping through the first two rounds — the longest wait to start a series in more than a century — for four goals in the opening 11 1/2 minutes. Montreal repeatedly got loose for clean breakouts and breakaways for high-danger chances against Frederik Andersen in that one.
But Carolina looked much closer to its earlier form in holding Montreal to 12 shots on goal and giving up far fewer of those quick transition chances the Canadiens kept burying in Game 1.