In St Louis, the visiting Arizona Coyotes came to town and left with a pair of victories over the Blues without even a ‘how do you do’ for the locals.
The two wins were the first back-to-back wins for Arizona this season.
Darcy Kuemper made 24 saves for Arizona who improved to 5-5-1.
“The guys did a good job in front of me,” Kuemper said. “We were good at all ends of the rink. Power play was working, [penalty kill] was working, everything that we wanted. It was a huge win.”
Robert Thomas picked up the only goal for the Blues.
“We were fighting it; you could tell we weren’t clean, especially off the start,” the Blues’ Ryan O’Reilly said. “Little plays we didn’t connect on, I think it got in our heads a bit. You could tell we had the right intention, but it wasn’t strong. I think we were hesitating just a little bit too much and not trusting ourselves.”
Jakob Chychrun potted a pair for the Coyotes.
Clayton Keller had a single marker off the power play in the win.
“We stuck with it. It was a back-and-forth game,” Keller said. “A lot of guys stepped up. … It was a great game, ‘Kuemps’ played awesome and it was good to close that one out.”
St Louis dropped to 7-4-1.
“I’ve had a lot of chances the last couple games,” Keller said. “For whatever reason, they just weren’t going in, but you stick with it. I thought I had a really good practice [Friday] and I think it translated over.”
Chychrun’s second goal was an empty-netter to ice the win.
Ville Husso made 16 saves in the loss.
Thomas left the game with an apparent upper body injury.
“He had a great shift there with [Ivan] Barbashev and [Oskar] Sundqvist and yeah, it’s unfortunate,” Berube said. “I feel bad for Robert, really bad. He’s had a tough start (to the season), but I was convinced he was going to work his way out of it, and now it’s an injury, so it’s unfortunate.”
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