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Two of the NHL’s slickest offensive talents will go head-to-head at the Saddledome on Saturday.Rookie star Elias Petterson leads the Vancouver Canucks into Calgary to face red-hot Johnny Gaudreau and the Flames.Both teams are coming off big road wins on Thursday.Article continues below ...Gaudreau posted his fourth career hat-trick Thursday in a 4-1 win in Winnipeg. He has 32 points in his last 19 games Tomas Tatar Jersey Womens , 13 of those points being goals.Pettersson had a goal and an assist as Vancouver scored on four of their first six shots in Edmonton in a 4-2 win over the Oilers. He has the game-winning goal in four of Vancouver’s past seven wins.Both teams practiced at Calgary’s Stampede Corral on Thursday, walking over from the Saddledome in full uniform. The old 7,000-seat arena was the Flames first home when they moved from Atlanta in 1980.Thursday’s game in Winnipeg ended on a nervous note for Calgary. Gaudreau took a slash from Jets‘ big defensemen Dustin Byfuglien late in Thursday’s game when he raced towards an empty-net goal. He left the ice in discomfort. It was enough of a slash that Byfuglien was fined $2,500 on Friday.Gaudreau also shook off the whack when talking to the media.“You know, it’s part of hockey. I mean, it won’t be the last time I’m slashed,” Gaudreau he told reporters. “Just kind of surprised. I had a foot or two on him, so I didn’t think I was going to get a stick to the arm, but I found the empty net and that’s the way it goes.” The Flames get nervous when Gaudreau is slashed because he suffered a broken thumb two years ago and missed 21 games after taking a chop from Minnesota Wild forward Eric Staal. The league began a crackdown on slashing for the 2017-2018 because of an increasing use of the stick.Calgary snapped a three-game losing streak in Winnipeg and is 6-3-1 in their past 10 games. They occupied top spot in the Pacific Division as of Friday afternoon, with a two point lead on San Jose with a game in hand.Vancouver has surprised so far in what was expected to be a rebuilding year and are 7-2-1 in their past 10 games led by Pettersson, who is headed towards a runaway win in the race for the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s top freshmen. As of Friday Vancouver was a point back of the second wild card spot through 40 games.Though it’s only the midway point of the 82-game season, Saturday’s game is being given plenty of importance.“As much as we’ve been on a good run lately Tom Kuhnhackl Jersey Womens , so has everybody else,” Flames general manager Brad Treliving told Postmedia News.“It’s not like we’ve built this big (separation between other teams). Most times when you go on a run, you build a significant cushion. We are just trying to keep our heads above everybody right now. There’s lots of runway left in the season, lots of good hockey teams that we’re playing.” The Canucks likewise aren’t celebrating their early season success.“From Day 1, we’ve talked about how we want to play,”head coach Travis Green told reporters in Edmonton. “We want to be faster and harder to play against, and we wanted to play meaningful games down the stretch. “We’re not getting ahead of ourselves – we’re at .500 right now and we have a long way to go.” WASHINGTON (AP) Nicklas Backstrom dreamed about the road less traveled.Driving down Constitution Avenue on his way to each home game since his NHL debut in 2007, he imagined the street lined with overjoyed Washington Capitals fans.”It always popped up in my head that one time we’re going to have a parade here, and finally that day is here,” Backstrom said.It all becomes reality Tuesday when Backstrom and the Stanley Cup-champion Capitals give the city its first parade for a major pro sports team since the NFL’s Redskins in 1992. The parade is 26 years in the making for Washington sports fans who endured long, lean years of heartbreak.”I don’t think anyone doubted what this city would do,” longtime Nationals infielder Ryan Zimmerman said. ”It’s just a matter of getting there and having the ability to do it. They definitely held up their end of the bargain.”Tens of thousands gathered for viewing parties of road playoff games on the way to the Capitals’ first championship since beginning play in 1974. They camped out on the streets to watch on giant video screens – the kinds of scenes more germane to presidential inaugurations in this town than sporting events.”I thought it was really cool when we were even at home and everyone was outside and going nuts and they would show that right after we would score a goal Anthony Beauvillier Jersey Womens ,” defenseman John Carlson said. ”I think that was probably one of the coolest moments of the playoffs for me and just seeing the support. … I think we deserve it, and so do the fans.”It has been a long time coming. Since the Redskins won the Super Bowl in January 1992, the 1998 Capitals were the only Washington team in the NHL, NBA, NFL or Major League Baseball to reach a league semifinal until this spring, a drought of 74 combined seasons without a championship.When the Capitals took the Cup into the Nationals’ clubhouse on Saturday, coach Barry Trotz wanted players to know: ”There’s no curse or anything. It’s all gone.” All they had to do to know that was look around the past two months to see the doubt being chipped away.Nationals manager Davey Martinez, who texted with Trotz throughout the run, got his first real taste of Washington sports in the playoffs with the Chicago Cubs last year when he came out of the dugout seeing 50,000 fans in red and couldn’t hear himself think because it was so loud.”Right then and there I said, `Hey, these people Dustin Tokarski Jersey Womens , they’re in, they love it,”’ Martinez recalled. ”This is exciting. And the city then rallied this year around the Caps. I get it. It was awesome. It was good for the city. Good for us. I know our boys were all in, they were excited about everything. I told them yesterday, `Let’s just keep it rolling. The city’s all-in.”’Washington isn’t a city accustomed to being all-in because of the scars of so many playoff failures over the years. Longtime Capitals season-ticket holder Jimmy Patterson said fans became reluctant to get together to watch games because the mood at the end of the night wasn’t something anyone wanted to endure in a group setting.That’s part of what made the public gatherings for Game 7 of the Eastern Conference final and throughout the Stanley Cup Final so remarkable. Exorcising franchise-long demons by beating the Pittsburgh Penguins in the second round seemed to free fans to actually enjoy themselves.”It showed what they were capable of and shows if you get to that level, they’re going to match it or even step it up a little bit more than the actual players,” Zimmerman said.Fans celebrating the Capitals beating the Penguins led ESPN’s Michael Wilbon – a former Washington Post columnist – to call D.C. a ”minor league sports town.” It’s not the first knock on Washington, though 14 years of playing baseball in the city has given Zimmerman some clarity on explaining that it’s not Boston, Chicago, New York or Philadelphia, and he doesn’t think it has to be.”This is such an interesting city because not many people are from here, so it’s hard to be a Boston or a Chicago Valtteri Filppula Jersey Womens ,” Zimmerman said. ”That’s a generational sports town. So it’s nothing against (Washington). They shouldn’t be like that. They have no reason to be like that.”A lot of these people move here for work in their early to mid-20s or come here even later than that and they adopt a team. This is what happens nowadays: Everyone compares everything. Just let it be. Let it be what it is. We have great fans and obviously if you make the playoffs and get to a Stanley Cup finals, you have really great fans just like any city would.”Thousands of fans are expected to watch the parade, from 17th to 7th on Constitution. Trotz has been thinking about something like this since he arrived in 2014.”You start thinking about, `Well, what would it mean?’ and then you think about a possible parade on one of the most famous streets in all the world, really, and it’s sort of now coming into play,” Trotz said. ”It’s going to come true.”—More Stanley Cup coverage: https://apnews.com/tag/StanleyCupFinals—