In St Louis, Jonathan Quick made 28 saves and the Los Angeles Kings doubled up the Blues, 6-3, on Sunday to earn a split of their two-game set.
“I would say without a doubt, all three zones were solid,” Kings head coach Todd McLellan said. “We were skating. There was a tenacity to us. We were responsible. I thought this was the first time we took the game to a team rather than receiving it.”
Ryan O’Reilly had a goal and Brayden Schenn struck twice for St Louis who dropped to 3-2-1 on the season.
“We needed to come out and respond and get to our game, but I think we’re overthinking it and we get caught on our heels,” O’Reilly said. “You can just kind of see it. It feels like every bounce goes their way and we’re creating those bounces going against us because we’ve overthinking and we’re not going and just trusting ourselves. That’s what happens and you can see in the third period when we do kind of trust each other and we just go, go, go, bounces start to come our way and there’s chances and we have a push. It’s disappointing, it’s the thing we’ve been struggling with the whole season so far. It’s obviously a concern. We have to find a way to do that.”
The Kings fell behind early, replied with five straight goals for a 5-1 lead.
“We were much better in our end, which allowed us to get on the forecheck,” McLellan said. “The pieces were all working together.”
The Blues tried to respond, scoring twice, one from O’Reilly and Schenn’s second of the night to cut the deficit to 3-5.
“[We] turned over pucks, thought we’d go east-west with it and gave them opportunities and chances and odd-man rushes, and we know as a group we can’t play that style of hockey,” Schenn said. “That’s not how you win hockey games, and [we] got away from our game for 25 minutes of that hockey game, 30 minutes of that hockey game, and it was 5-1 before we knew it.”
Anze Kopitar, Gabriel Vilardi and Lias Andersson contributed to LA’s five-goal outburst over the second and third periods.
“I think we came out with a little bit more authority that first period,” Kopitar said.. “Even though we didn’t score a whole lot of goals, it was probably one of the best periods that we played. Being aggressive, being on top of pucks and shooting the puck too. Second period, the floodgates kind of opened up for us, and the third, we’ll work on it.”
Alex Iafallo (power-play) and Carl Grundstrom also scored for the Kings.
Drew Doughty ended the suspense with an empty-net strike.
Ville Husso made 29 saves in his first NHL start.
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