Three shutouts in their four games were just too many for the St Louis Blues’ brass.
That lack of offense cost Mike Yeo his head coaching job after a 2-0 loss to the hapless Los Angeles Kings.
Calvin Petersen made 29 saves for the shutout, his first career NHL shutout.
“It has to be the top,” Petersen said of the shutout among his career accomplishments. “For it to come at this level against that type of competition is very rewarding. At the same time, the amount of effort and sacrifice that the boys put in tonight, it’s just as much a shutout on their part as it is on mine.”
Matt Luff scored his first NHL goal in the win for LA.
“It wasn’t a perfect shot but luckily it went in,” Luff said. “I thought about it a little bit in the previous games. Tonight it was in my head to just don’t think about it. I kind of just blocked it out and shot my shot and it went in.”
The Blues are 1-4-0 in their last five and dropped to 7-9-3.
“It’s weird,” St. Louis center Tyler Bozak said. “At the start of the year we were scoring a ton of goals and giving up way too many, and now we’re not scoring but we’re not giving up as much either. It’s kind of weird how it goes like that but we’ve got to get back to work tomorrow. We’ve got a big stretch of games here against some really good hockey teams so it’s going to be important for us to focus on some good things we did and build off that and be ready to go to Nashville.”
Anze Kopitar added an empty-net goal late to close out the scoring.
[WATCH: All Kings vs. Blues highlights | RELATED: Yeo fired as coach of Blues]
Jake Allen made 25 saves in the loss.
“Yeah, it’s frustrating. We had some good looks, especially there at the end. But we’ve got to find ways to score. You can’t win hockey games without scoring goals,” Alex Pietrangelosaid after the loss.
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