VANCOUVER — The best cure for whatever ails the Blues this season continues to be to go west. To wit, the Blues have dominated the Pacific Division, and that continued to be the case Wednesday at Rogers Arena.
After spotting the Canucks leads of 1-0 and 2-1, St. Louis kicked into gear by scoring the next three goals and then hung on for a 4-3 victory and a season series sweep against the Canucks — three games to none.
The game turned on special teams in the second period, with a shorthanded goal by Robert Thomas tying the game at 2-2 and then a power-play goal by Ryan O’Reilly giving the Blues a 3-2 lead.
The Blues’ forechecking was a thing of beauty — rugged beauty, if you will. Ville Husso was more than good enough in goal as the Blues improved to 13-3-2 against the Pacific Division this season.
At 37-20-9 overall, the Blues now have 83 points for the season and leapfrogged ahead of Nashville for third place in the Central Division.
There have been more last-minute lineup changes for the Blues than any season in recent memory, and the latest example came when Jordan Kyrou was a pregame scratch. Kyrou, the team’s leading scorer with 62 points (22 goals, 40 assists) took part in the morning skate and line rushes but was nowhere to be found during pregame warmups.
The team announced he was out with illness. That pushed Logan Brown, who was scheduled for healthy scratch status, into the lineup. He joined Mackenzie MacEachern and Nathan Walker on the fourth line. Alexei Toropchenko was moved up from the fourth line into Kyrou’s slot on the third line with Ivan Barbashev and Brayden Schenn.
Kyrou became the fifth Blues player to miss at least one game with illness, with all of the instances coming after the NHL relaxed its COVID-19 protocols after the All-Star break.
The Canucks came out of the gates quickly, and the Blues were on their heels to a degree in the opening minutes. Conor Garland, who did a thing or two against the Blues last year as a member of the Arizona Coyotes’ “Short Leash” line, hit the goal post just 1:50 into the contest.
But that proved to be the Canucks’ best chance of the first period. The Blues gradually got their legs under them, and that meant they got their forechecking going. As the period progressed the Blues kept the play in the Vancouver defensive zone, at times visibly rattling the Canucks.
Trouble was, that forechecking didn’t result in many shots for the Blues, even though they spent a fair amount of time buzzing around the net and Vancouver goalie Thatcher Demko. The Blues had only seven shots on goal in the period — to Vancouver’s five, but the visitors did have a couple of prime chances.
Midway through the period, Vladimir Tarasenko was camped to Demko’s left at the net-front but couldn’t get his stick on the puck right away. Demko ended up making a glove save to deny Tarasenko.
With three and a half minutes left in the opening period, Thomas headed an odd-man rush down the ice. He ended up waiting just a split-second too long to take his shot, unsuccessfully trying to stuff the puck through Demko’s legs.
So for the first time since Feb. 27 in Chicago, what turned out to be a 4-0 Blues victory, St. Louis was part of a game in which neither team scored in the first 20 minutes.
But it didn’t take Vancouver long to change that. Just 31 seconds into the second period, there were two Blues and two Canucks scrapping for the puck behind the St. Louis net. The Canucks’ Alex Chiasson peeled off from the scrum, behind Nick Leddy, who didn’t follow him. Left all alone, Chiasson quickly banged a net-front shot pasts Husso for a 1-0 Vancouver lead.
But Leddy made amends with his first goal as a member of the Blues. It was a shot from the left point, through traffic that included a net-front screen by Brandon Saad. It was just Leddy’s second goal of the season, the first coming with Detroit — so it was a 1-1 game at the 7:26 mark of the second.
For the most part, the Blues kept up their offensive pressure. But then a turnover came back to bite them. Tarasenko’s intended clearing pass was picked off by Vancouver inside the blue line. Elias Pettersson made quick work of it, giving the Canucks a 2-1 lead with his 21st goal of the season.
Things reached a critical stage for the Blues when less than two minutes after the Pettersson goal, MacEachern was sent off for tripping. But the Blues made lemonade out of lemons when Thomas raced down the ice to beat Demko with a roof shot for a shorthanded goal.
It was the Blues’ eighth shorthanded goal of the season, with the last two belonging to Thomas after his 13th goal of the season. Wait, there’s more. A 2-2 hockey game became a 3-2 game — and the first Blues’ lead of the game — on the power play before the period was out.
Saad drew the penalty with an aggressive charge to the net — a holding call on Vancouver’s Vasily Podkolzin with 3:33 left in the second. Stationed in the “bumper” position in the near slot, O’Reilly took a pinpoint pass from Schenn below the goal line and scored his 15th goal of the season. Over their previous three games, the Blues were 1 for 11 on the power play.
On to the third period. This wasn’t one of those third periods where the Blues tried to sit on a lead. They did just the opposite, keeping the pressure on the Canucks and controlling most of the zone time.
They kept grinding and grinding to the point where it almost seemed like a goal was inevitable. It finally happened, and with the fourth line on the ice. Walker pounced on the rebound of a MacEachern shot to beat Demko from the slot.
It was Walker’s sixth goal in just 14 games this season, giving the Blues a 4-2 lead with 9:29 to play.
____
