PITTSBURGH (AP) The Pittsburgh Penguins will start their bid for a Stanley Cup three-peat at home.Sidney Crosby and Jake Guentzel banked in goals off Craig Anderson minutes apart in the second period Chris Kunitz Jersey Womens , Casey DeSmith stopped 34 shots and the Penguins beat the Ottawa Senators 4-0 to clinch second place in the Metropolitan Division and home-ice advantage in the opening round of the playoffs.Phil Kessel got his 34th goal of the season and Patric Hornqvist pushed his career-high to 29 when he beat Anderson late in the third period for the Penguins, who will host Columbus, New Jersey or Philadelphia next week.Anderson finished with 19 saves but was beaten twice from behind the goal line in the second period as the Senators lost for the ninth time in 11 games.Ottawa and Pittsburgh met in the Eastern Conference finals 10 months ago, with the Penguins winning on an overtime goal in Game 7 before going on to beat Nashville for their second straight Cup. The Senators hoped it would be a springboard to becoming perennial contenders. Instead they will miss the postseason for the third time in five years.DUCKS 5, STARS 3ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) – Jakob Silfverberg had a goal and two assists to help Anaheim keep up its surge toward the postseason with its ninth win in 11 games.Josh Manson and Andrew Cogliano each had a goal and an assist for the Ducks, who leapfrogged the Los Angeles Kings by one point for third place in the Pacific Division. The playoff-bound rivals have been trading the spot down the stretch, and the race will go down to the last day of the regular season.Rickard Rakell and Derek Grant also scored for Anaheim before Cogliano got a key breakaway goal with 5:25 to play. Ryan Miller made 23 saves to win his second straight start in place of John Gibson. Miller also earned the 369th victory of his NHL career, tying Tom Barrasso for second among U.S.-born goaltenders.Jamie Benn had a goal and an assist, and Marc Methot and Radek Faksa also scored for Dallas. Mike McKenna stopped 28 shots in his second appearance of the season.LIGHTNING 7, SABRES 5TAMPA, Fla. (AP) – Nikita Kucherov became the second player in the NHL to reach 100 points this season, and Tampa Bay took a two-point lead for the Eastern Conference and Atlantic Divisiion lead.Kucherov scored in the first period and got his 100th point assisting on Dan Girardi’s goal 1:04 into the second that put the Lightning up 4-2. Edmonton’s Connor McDavid tops the league with 106 points. According to the NHL Brandon Manning Jersey Womens , this is the first season since 2009-10 with multiple 100-point players.The Lightning got two goals from Anthony Cirelli, while Yanni Gourde, Brayden Point and Victor Hedman also scored. Alex Killorn had three assists and Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 27 shots.Casey Mittelstadt and Alexander Nylander each got his first NHL goal for the last-place Sabres. Jason Pominville, Jordan Nolan and Kyle Okposo also scored for Buffalo, and Chad Johnson had 27 saves.BLUES 4, BLACKHAWKS 1CHICAGO (AP) – Patrik Berglund scored three times, including a tiebreaking rebound goal in the third period, and St. Louis moved into position for the last Western Conference wild card.Carter Hutton made 19 saves as St. Louis stopped a three-game slide. Jaden Schwartz also scored in the third after an ugly turnover by the Blackhawks.The Blues (44-31-6) moved one point ahead of the idle Avalanche (42-30-9) heading into their finale in Colorado on Saturday night. St. Louis has won three of four against Colorado this season.Erik Gustafsson scored for Chicago, and Jean-Francois Berube made 31 saves. The last-place Blackhawks (33-38-10) finished with an 18-18-5 record at home. SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — For Steven Stamkos and the Tampa Bay Lightning, just about everything has gone right so far this season.But as they get ready to return from the All-Star break as the NHL’s top team, the Lightning knows there is little they can do before April to make this a successful campaign.Tampa Bay leads the league with 76 points so far this season, opening up a 13-point edge over the next best team in the Eastern Conference. But after losing in the Stanley Cup Final in 2015 and then in Game 7 of the conference finals in 2016 and ’18 Cam Ward Jersey Womens , nothing short of winning it all will be enough for the Lightning.“There’s still some unfinished business,” Stamkos said at All-Star weekend. “We have a chip on our shoulder. I’m sure there are a lot of teams that would be happy to go to a Stanley Cup Final and three of the last four Eastern Conference Finals. That’s tough to do. But with the expectations being so high for our group, we came into this year thinking this was our year, our turn.”The Lightning thought that also was the case a year ago when they took a 3-2 lead over Washington in the conference final. But they were outscored 7-0 in the next two games and it was the Capitals who ended up winning it all.Nikita Kucherov, who leads the NHL with 78 points, says it’s simple what needs to be different this time around.“Just make sure we score goals in Game 6 and 7 and play well defensively,” he said.There is still much to be decided in the final 10 weeks of the season. There are competitive division races outside of Tampa Bay’s runaway pace in the Atlantic, and 23 of the 31 teams are within five points of a playoff berth.Even in a place like Edmonton where the Oilers have been in turmoil for much of the season — with coach Todd McLellan getting fired in November and general manager Peter Chiarelli losing his job just before the break — there is still hope for the stretch run.Star Connor McDavid was grilled on media day about the problems, but he tried to put a positive light on it, pointing out that the team is just three points out of the playoffs despite so much going wrong.“What I look forward to coming back from the break is trying our best to prove everyone wrong,” he said. “We have an opportunity here, where things seem pretty down on us, there’s a sense of negativity with the media Matt Hunwick Jersey Womens , with everyone around the team, we get to prove people wrong. We get to decide how we’re going to finish the second half. That’s what I’m looking forward to.”The tightest races are in the Metropolitan Division, where the upstart Islanders are three points ahead of the defending champion Capitals and the Central Division where powerhouses Nashville and Winnipeg are tied with 64 points apiece.The Jets had won six of seven before dropping the final game before the break, while the Predators broke out of a rough patch of four losses in five games by winning at Colorado and Vegas.“Obviously the big thing for us is getting guys healthy and trying to get momentum going our way,” Nashville goalie Pekka Rinne said. “We’ve been a little bit inconsistent the last little while. Before going on the break I felt that we were playing pretty strong hockey and I hope that we can continue that and keep building on that.”Calgary has built a little more of an edge in the Pacific with a five-point lead over San Jose, but both the Sharks and defending Western Conference champion Golden Knights are poised to push the Flames down the stretch.The Sharks finished before the break with a thrilling, come-from-behind 7-6 overtime win at Washington and hope the preseason addition of star defenseman Erik Karlsson proves to be the final piece needed to lead the franchise to its first championship.After a somewhat slow start, Karlsson has been playing at an elite level the past two months, showing why the Sharks coveted him so much. The next big question will be whether they can lock him up with a long-term deal before he can become a free agent this summer.San Jose can offer Karlsson an eight-year contract — one year longer than anyone else — after the Feb. 25 trade deadline, but Karlsson said he is not worried about that just yet.“I’m enjoying every moment,” he said. “I’m not going to speak about the future. I’ve enjoyed every second. We’ve got a great team, and I’m excited for the last 30 games.”