Coyotes full of skills in win over Blues

In St Louis on Tuesday, Conor Garland scored early in the third period to get the Arizona Coyotes even with the Blues at 2-2.

The Coyotes then won it after the skills competition, 3-2, to end the Blues’ seven-game winning streak.

“I’m proud of the guys,” Coyotes coach Rick Tocchet said. “You guys know the circumstances. It’s been a tough schedule and not much sleep. That’s a [heck] of a hockey club over there. A little bit of rope-a-dope and it was nice to win this game.”

Darcy Kuemper made 33 saves in the win.

Arizona has won two straight in shootouts after beating the Washington Capitals Monday.

Jaden Schwartz and Colton Parayko scored for St Louis.

“You can’t win every single game,” Parayko said. “There’s 82 games. Every team wants to win. Every team’s too good in this League, good players on every team. One point could be the difference between us winning the division and us not winning the division. My [third] year (in 2017-18), that was the difference between making the playoffs and us not. We’ll take points, we’ll put it in the bank and just keep moving forward.”

Clayton Keller also scored in regulation for Arizona.

“I think that as a five-man unit there, we were all kind of in sync,” Keller said. “[Alex Goligoski] makes a good play and [Christian Dvorak] makes a great play on the wall, and it’s pretty easy from there. [Garland’s] driving to the net and I hit him back door. I think that was a big goal for us.”

Garland and Nick Schmaltz had strikes in the skills portion of the evening.

“I work on it all the time in the summer,” Garland said. “I know that every point is valuable so if I’m going to have my number called, you’ve got to give your team the best chance to win.”

[WATCH: All Coyotes vs. Blues highlights]

Jordan Binnington made 20 saves in the loss.

“We had our chances, we had our looks,” Schwartz said. “Just didn’t find the back of the net. We certainly had a lot of chances, a lot of O-zone time.

“I think we still had some good looks. I don’t know how many shots we had, but I still think we had some good looks from the middle. I think we had a few power plays there where we could have executed a little bit better and get a little more momentum. We didn’t play horrible. We just didn’t find a way to win, which we’ve been doing.”