Hull’s 100th Playoff Goal Puts Him in Elite Group

RALEIGH, N.C. —  Detroit winger Brett Hull joined a select number of players when he scored his 100th playoff goal Monday night in the Red Wings’ 3-0 victory over Carolina in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals.

Hull trails only Wayne Gretzky (122), Mark Messier (109) and Jari Kurri (106) on the all-time list.

“It’s [special] in that I have joined quite a group and I am very proud to be a part of it,” said Hull, who scored his team-leading 10th playoff goal and recorded his 23rd postseason game-winning goal. “I guess there was a time when there was talk that you could never win in the playoffs with Brett Hull and all of a sudden you win a Cup.”

Detroit Coach Scotty Bowman said it’s time people start looking at Hull as one of the game’s top all-time scorers.

“He’s a pure goal scorer,” Bowman said. “We know that he got his 10th goal tonight in a league where it’s really tough to score.”

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Carolina goaltender Arturs Irbe nearly faced more odd-man rushes Monday than he did over the first three games of the series.

“I know what kind of players are on the ice,” Irbe said of the talented Red Wings after he made 24 saves Monday. “Once the puck hits that player, that’s when I react and try to see their tendencies. That’s the only way to go about it.”

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Detroit defenseman Jiri Fischer’s third-period cross-check on Carolina winger Tommy Westlund sent Westlund to the ice and bloodied his face but no penalty was called.... Of the 26 teams that have led, 3-1, in the Stanley Cup finals, 25 have gone on to win the NHL championship. The only time a team has overcome such a deficit to win the Stanley Cup was in 1942 when Toronto rallied past Detroit.

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A Texas-based ticket broker has turned over 100 Stanley Cup finals tickets to the state of North Carolina as part of a settlement of a lawsuit filed last week by Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s attorney general.

In a settlement signed over the weekend, Encore Tickets of Dallas agreed to return all unsold tickets it had purchased to games between the Carolina Hurricanes and the Detroit Red Wings. Cooper had filed a lawsuit to stop ticket brokers from selling tickets at illegally inflated prices. The 100 tickets will go to local charities. Cooper said many tickets for the games, which sold out in less than an hour, were bought by ticket companies, which resold the tickets for as much as $1,000 each.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.