In St Louis, the Edmonton Oilers’ Ryan Nugent-Hopkins scored late in the third period to snap a 1-1 tie with the Blues en route to a 3-1 win on Wednesday night.
For Nugent-Hopkins, it was his 200th NHL goal.
“To be honest, I didn’t know it was 200,” Nugent-Hopkins, the No. 1 pick in the 2011 NHL Draft, said. “We just stuck with it the entire game. It was a hard-fought game the whole way through. Obviously, happy to get that go-ahead one there. We shut it down [after that].”
Stuart Skinner made 37 saves in the Oilers win.
“We got a great goaltending performance from Stuart Skinner,” Oilers coach Jay Woodcroft said. “This was in a tough building. Nobody expects a game like that more than Stuart Skinner himself. For me, my relationship with him, I’ve seen him grow and he continues to grow. This is his true first year in the NHL. He has the confidence of the coaching staff. I started him because I thought he’d help us win the game. It’s a credit to him to have that confidence from everybody.”
Ryan O’Reilly was the lone striker for the Blues.
“It’s frustrating but we kind of got what we deserved,” O’Reilly said. ‘We didn’t start off very good in the first period. The first period, we were on our heels just watching a lot. It was right there for us, especially that one play I thought was a hook, it’s a turnover and an icing and it’s in the back of the net. A bad bounce, unfortunately. We had good pressure in the third and I thought we had a chance to win it. Unfortunately, we didn’t. We’ll respond and get back to it tomorrow.”
St Louis had their chances, but nothing was working until the O’Reilly goal.
“It was better,” Blues coach Craig Berube said. “I thought there was some good stuff around the net, rebound action. Their goalie played well, so did ours.
“[Skinner] made a couple saves and we missed the net a couple times on that. It’s close, even with the goalie out, we had a couple good looks. You’ve just got to stick with it. Goal scoring’s funny sometimes. You dry up sometimes. I know it doesn’t happen to us a lot sometimes, but right now, it’s at that point. We’ve got to simplify it and we’ve got to get some dirty goals. That’s the bottom line.”
The Oilers took a 1-0 lead in the first period off a goal from Jesse Puljujarvi .
“I think we should be happy,” Nugent-Hopkins said. “We had a few little breakdowns. We had ‘Stu’ when we needed him and the D-men made some big plays. We found a way to break them down. The first [road game] was a good one. We just have to keep on doing it.”
Zach Hyman popped in an empty-net goal for the 3-1 final.
Jordan Binnington made 25 saves in the Blues loss.
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