In Columbus, Yegor Chinakhov hit for a double in the third period to help the Blue Jackets to a 5-2 win over the visiting St Louis Blues on Friday night. 
Jet Greaves made 41 saves in the win.
“It was fun,” Greaves said. “I felt the guys were great in front of me. I thought it was a really good 60 for us, especially coming off a back to back. It’s a really good game to build on for this group.
“Something we’ve talked about is making sure we close out games in the third and I thought we did a great job with that. They had the empty net there for six minutes and I think we did a really good job of keeping the traffic out and clearing the loose pucks.”
The Blue Jackets moved to 9-15-5, and stopped a three-game skid.
Columbus hit first with a marker from Kirill Marchenko at 1:42 of the opening stanza.
“We just keep progressing together and go step up,” Marchenko said. “Every game we try.”St Louis’ Robert Thomas also hit for a double in the game.
Thomas scored his first of the night at 14:36 to tie the game, 1-1.
“We got down and couldn’t find a way to fight back,” Thomas said. “We had power-play chances. We need to find a way to score. It changes the game if we get it to 2-2. That’s on our power play to get some momentum and score some goals.
“We’ve got lots of chances but we need to find a way to put them in. It’s costing us games.”
St Louis dropped to 13-12-1.
“Doesn’t matter who you play, if you give teams opportunities to make plays, their guys end up making them and you’ll be taking the puck out of the net,” St. Louis defenseman Torey Krug said.
With three minutes left in the first, Adam Fantilli put the Blue Jackets up, 2-1 on a shot from the left side.
“We came out with confidence,” Fantilli said. “We were trusting each other, we trust our system, played hard. We kind of stayed more engaged. We didn’t sit back to try and protect the lead. We were trying to extend it and get more goals to differentiate that 2-1, 3-1 lead. Trying to build on that and make that lead bigger keeps us playing our game.”
After a scoreless middle frame, Chinakhov hit for his double with the first coming at at 6:26 of the third, and his double scored at 12:21, off the power play, to extend the advantage to 4-1 for Columbus.
Thomas hit for his double at 17:41 to trim the St Louis deficit to 4-2, the goal came with the Blues having an empty net.
Alexandre Texier hit the empty net with four seconds left for the 5-2 final.
Joel Hofer made 17 saves in the loss.
“We made three mistakes tonight — three goals in our net,” St. Louis coach Craig Berube said. “We had chances but when you make mistakes, they capitalized on them. We made two in the third. There’s a face-off play we turned it over on it. They got an odd-man rush. The PK goal was a mistake too.”
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