In St Paul, Thomas Greiss made 35 saves on Sunday night and the St Louis Blues shut out the Minnesota Wild, 3-0.
“I’ve been around awhile and played in all kinds of situations,” Greiss said. “We’ve got a good goalie coach here (David Alexander). We do good drills and just stay on top of practice every day and stay pretty sharp there.”
Greiss made 23 saves in the third period.
Brandon Saad scored in the opening frame to give the Blues a 1-0 lead, and all the offense they would need.
“It’s always nice to score goals and contribute to wins,” Saad said. “My linemates are making great plays out there, so it’s nice to see them go in.”
St Louis improved to 20-18-3.
“I think we’ve done a good job this year on back to backs, and I don’t think we have not been energized on back to backs,” St. Louis coach Craig Berube said. “That’s kind of what I was thinking.
“I felt like we were going to get a good effort tonight. We had some new guys in the lineup, a lot of young guys in the lineup. They’re going to play hard, they’re going to do their thing, and our veterans did a real good job of managing the game tonight, in my opinion. Managing the game, managing the puck.”
The Wild dropped to 22-14-3.
“We liked our game today, defensively for sure,” Wild coach Dean Evason said. “Offensively, we couldn’t freaking score, right? You even look at the end there, the pucks we threw at the net were ping-ponging all over the place and didn’t find their way not even into the net, they didn’t find their way onto the net. Normally they do. We got enough pucks there. We got 20-plus shots plus the ones that didn’t get there. I don’t know how many attempts we had at the net, so I’m not worried about that. We liked our defensive structure tonight. We liked our commitment defensively. We did a lot of good things. We clearly didn’t score a goal.”
Brayden Schenn scored twice in the third period, once at 14:00 of the period for a 2-0 lead, and then with six seconds left into an empty net for the 3-0 final.
Filip Gustavsson made 21 saves in the Wild loss.
“I think the third period is more like how we used to play on nights where we win the game,” Gustavsson said. “Just need to try and find a way to do it in the first and second period, too, and really force a goal. Maybe do an ugly goal or something. That’s all we can do.”
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