In St Louis, Elvis Merzlikins made a case for why he should be higher on the Columbus Blue Jackets depth chart in goal on Tuesday night.
Merzlikins, who has been vocal about his place on the goalie rotation in Columbus, made 21 saves in a 1-0 shutout of the Blues.
“This is huge for, not just for me, but for the team,” Merzlikins said. “Honestly, without their help, I would not make it.”
Columbus improved to 16-24-10.
“It was a total team effort. From the special teams, we had great looks on the power play, the penalty kill did a good job,” Columbus coach Pascal Vincent said. “I thought we played a real smart road game today.”
Dmitri Voronkov was the game’s lone striker.
“Elvis was solid,” Vincent said. “Made a key save, an unbelievable save at the key time.”
Voronkov scored, off a set by Zach Werenski at 4:11 of the third period to give Columbus the 1-0 lead.
“I just kind of twisted and saw [Voronkov] there, so I fired one over, and he makes a good play,” Werenski said. “But I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. It kind of worked out, I guess.”
Werenski had caused a turnover by the Blues’ Robert Thomas at the blue line.
“The entry, we had guys pulling up when we should have been driving to the net to open up the plays that were coming late, and it would have opened up,” St. Louis coach Drew Bannister said. “But for some reason, we decided to pull up just inside the blue line instead of finishing routes to the net.”
The Blues dropped to 26-21-2.
“We didn’t play well enough to win a hockey game here tonight, no question about that,” St. Louis coach Drew Bannister said. “The first period, we weren’t skating, we weren’t engaged at all. The second period, I thought we started to skate a little bit more, but we were playing cute hockey, and cute hockey doesn’t win at this level.”
Use CodePHN15 – Elvis has not left the building
Jordan Binnington made 21 saves in the loss.
“I think they competed hard, clogged up the middle a lot,” St. Louis forward Brandon Saad said. “We were playing too much perimeter hockey. They did a good job checking. We obviously didn’t have our best game.”
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