from Michael Russo of the StarTribune,

The music was of normal volume, the pats on the back like any other postgame.

There was no raucous celebration inside Madison Square Garden’s visiting locker room Friday night after the Wild steamrolled the New York Rangers 7-4, like this was any other victory.

Winning has become that business as usual for a confident team that would gladly move on to the next challenge now rather than letting the NHL’s three-day holiday hiatus interrupt all this fun.

“We don’t want to stop there,” Charlie Coyle said of breaking the franchise record with a 10th consecutive victory. “We don’t want to just beat it. We want to crush it.”

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from Tom Reed of the Columbus Dispatch,

One of the better stretches of Sergei Bobrovsky’s career concluded Friday night with two of the better stretches you will see from the agile puck stopper.

The Blue Jackets’ goaltender got his weary club into the Christmas break with a 2-1 victory over the Canadiens in Nationwide Arena to run its franchise-record winning streak to 12 games. He made 36 stops and none bigger than a pair of toe saves against Brendan Gallagher and Paul Byron on which he went farther out on limbs than Cossack dancers in his native Russia,

“Those are huge plays,” captain Nick Foligno said. “I think (Gallagher and Byron) are frustrated because they think they have him beat and all of a sudden his leg comes flying out of nowhere. That’s what he does to us in practice all the time.”

In racing to an improbable 23-5-4 start, the Blue Jackets haven’t needed him to be special on many nights.

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