In St Louis, the Blues picked up a rare two points in a 3-1 win over the Vegas Golden Knights on Wednesday night.
Jordan Binnington made 50 saves to earn the win.
“Binnington was unbelievable tonight,” the Blues’ Vladimir Tarasenko said. “We’re confident in ‘Binner,’ we’re confident in Ville (Husso). Tonight, he was awesome. There is nothing else to say.”
The victory snapped an ugly seven-game skid.
“It’s not always going to be perfect,” Binnington said. “It’s how you respond to adversity or just finding more digging deep inside. We needed a little more. We played a great game tonight. We’ve just got to keep building off that.”
Nicolas Roy was the lone goal scorer for the Knights, he ruined a shut out bid in the later minutes of the third period.
“We competed and we did a good job keeping [shots] to the outside and clearing out rebounds,” Binnington said. “The penalty kill was great. It’s a good win for us.”
Tarasenko put the Blues up 1-0 with less than a minute gone on fresh ice in the second period.
Sammy Blais doubled the lead in the eighth minute of the middle frame.
“You can’t really spot them two goals early,” Vegas’ Mark Stone said. “We blew them out in their building on Monday. It’s naive for us to think they’re not going to come out and give us their best game. We cheated the game a bit early. We were still looking for early offense. … They played hard for the first 20 minutes and pushed us on our heels with three breakaways in the first and a couple 2-on-1s. It could have been worse.”
Jake Walman scored his first NHL goal for St Louis, just past the midway point of the third period.
“I kind of blacked out a little bit, but it was a great play by our forwards to get the puck deep in the zone, and Kyrou made a good pass off the pad, I guess, and it came right to me and I was fortunate enough to put it in the net,” Walman said. “The whole thing is kind of a blur looking back on it. I just … so many emotions, especially on this day. Great feeling.”
Marc-Andre Fleury made 32 saves in the loss.
“We only scored one, so you’re never happy with all the looks,” Golden Knights head coach Peter DeBoer said. “I thought we generated some quality chances. We didn’t have as much traffic as we had the last game. Sometimes you have to give the other goalie some credit, and he was obviously excellent tonight. … We tried to get traffic there and a bunch of the looks, I thought we had some traffic in that area. But he fought through it and made some big saves.”
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