In St Louis, Jordan Greenway and Kirill Kaprizov scored in the opening period on Friday, and the Minnesota Wild defeated the Blues, 5-1, in Game 3.
The win gives the Wild a 2-1 series lead and restores home ice advantage.
“I just thought we simplified it,” Minnesota coach Dean Evason said. “We weren’t trying to go east-west. We were just getting pucks into the zone and skating, and that’s the game, right? And you know, everybody talks about our team being a physical team, but we can skate.”
Marc-Andre Fleury made 29 saves in the Wild win.
“St. Louis had good pressure to start,” Fleury said. “I thought our team defended well. We stuck together, stayed in the middle and didn’t give them too much.”
Ryan O’Reilly scored the Blues lone goal.
“We came out with great energy, feeding off the building, and I thought we did some great things well, but maybe got too excited offensively,” O’Reilly said. “We’ve got to be responsible and then build our game from there. Obviously we were down two early, and yeah, we need to respond quicker. We just kind of got a little frustrated, and it kind of just took the wind out of our sails. It was too tough to generate anything to kind of get the momentum back. Yeah, it was just difficult.”
Mats Zuccarello pushed the Wild lead to 3-0 in the eighth minute of the middle frame.
Minnesota maintained the pressure and extended the lead to 4-0 in the third period off a strike from Joel Eriksson Ek .
“It’s good to get a win here, get some confidence,” Zuccarello said. “At the same time, this game is over. You’re looking towards the next one.”
O’Reilly scored off the power play to the Blues on the board, Jonas Brodin hit for empty-net goal and the 5-1 final
Ville Husso made 28 saves in the St Louis loss.
“I think, obviously, we got pretty excited being back home with the crowd,” St. Louis’ Tyler Bozak said. “And maybe sometimes we hit when we didn’t need to or went out of our way to make a hit. We’ve got to be careful with that, running around too much, and just be poised, and we’ll be ready for next game.”
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