ST. LOUIS – Did someone say deja vu?
Unfortunately for the St. Louis Blues, it came to fruition and not in a good way.
For the second straight meeting with the Dallas Stars, they fall in a one-goal game, this time 4-3, due to icing the puck, losing a defensive zone face-off and seeing a goal scored late in the third period.
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Thomas Harley scored with 1:07 left and spoiled the Blues’ valiant third period comeback while playing shorthanded due to injury in another one-goal loss on Tuesday at Enterprise Center, dropping the home side to 19-25-9.
Down three goals in the third period and playing without Jake Neighbours (lower-body injury) and Jordan Kyrou (upper-body injury), Brayden Schenn scored twice and Robby Fabbri scored his first Blues goal over six years to erase a three-goal third-period deficit but to no avail. Jordan Binnington made 20 saves to fall to 2-10-1 in his past 13 starts.
Let’s dissect Tuesday’s game observations:
* Another icing leads to another goal-against for a loss – With the naked eye, it looked worse than originally thought, but on the play that led to the Harley goal, Tyler Tucker had full control of the puck moving up the lefthand side. He goes for a pass off the boards trying to hit Alexey Toropchenko near the Dallas bench, but on replay, the puck caromed off the boards, bounded up where Toropchenko couldn’t corral the puck for an icing.
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This just happened four days ago in Dallas when both Philip Broberg and Colton Parayko each iced the puck, and ultimately, the Stars won the draw and Jason Robertson scored with 1:00 remaining in a 3-2 win denying the Blues of at least a point.
Same thing here.
Personally, if Tucker is making that play, I’d like to see a direct pass, and if Toropchenko doesn’t handle it, then it’s on him. It’s just dangerous in that situation.
So it turns into an icing, Dallas can get its top players on the ice, while the Blues have their fourth line out there with Tucker and Logan Mailloux.
Nick Bjugstad loses the draw, and I understand when in each instance along with Friday, someone can say, ‘Win the face-off.’ Yes, this is true, but the draw was lost back to the point, and Harley’s shot caromed off Mathieu Joseph and change direction past Binnington.
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Game. Set. Match:
Blues coach Jim Montgomery was not critical of this one as he was of the plays on Friday.
“We have complete momentum in the game and that icing actually, I believe it was Tucker, uses an indirect for us to gain lines like we had been doing all period,” Montgomery said, “and it hits the boards and it jumps up five feet. I think [Toropchenko] couldn’t get a stick on it. That’s a physical thing with the boards. It’s not a mental mistake. It’s not like we panicked. We actually made a real sound play. The puck hit the boards toward the end of the period, the boards are snowy, it hits snow and it’s going to pop like that, and then you need an Albert Pujols to knock it out of the air there.
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“(This was) very different. That one was in control of ours; we made a mistake, we didn’t support the puck. We had support on the puck (Tuesday), we knew the guy was open. That was a good hockey play.”
Schenn, who has three goals the past two games, said, “Late in the game, yeah, poise, if that’s what you’re taking (about). The Dallas game before and this one, you have to have poise with the puck, but the forwards or players out there have to support each other and able to get the red line to not put yourself in those positions. We did it twice against them and they made us pay for them both times.”
A fifth consecutive loss (0-4-1) and a fourth straight game in which the Blues were in and found a way to lose.
“It sucks losing,” Schenn said. “When you battle back like that, play hard for one another and get rewarded with some goals. Again, same team, same result, losing in the last minute. It’s not fun losing, but got to keep on pushing our foot down and trying to get better. We’re finding ways to lose hockey games and we have to learn how to win them.”
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* Down two more players, a third period for the ages comeback was for naught – When Neighbours left after the first period and Kyrou after the second, they were not only down to 10 forwards but down three goals.
What’s the point, right? Wrong.
The Blues showed some valiant fight, and it started with Fabbri, who continues to show why the Blues brought him back, scratching and clawing for every inch when he’s given the opportunity.
It looked inconsequential at the time and only drew browning points for Fabbri scoring his first Blues goal in his second stint since his last goal on Oct. 17, 2019 before being traded to the Detroit Red Wings. He made it 3-1 at 3:15 on a play in which he started it with a strong hit and ensuing shot from the slot off Justin Faulk’s feed:
The Stats challenged the play for offside and Joseph was in question on the far side, but the league came back that the play was onside with the following ruling: It was determined that Joseph legally tagged up at the blue line before Faulk entered the offensive zone with the puck on his stick prior to Fabbri’s goal.
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“It definitely feels good to get the first one, but it’s a lot more fun around the rink when you’re winning,” Fabbri said. “I’ll definitely take more wins after this one.
“Once you get one on the board, everyone starts to put the foot on the gas there and we did that. When you start rolling shift after shift and you kind of get some momentum and the crowd gets into it, the bench gets into it and it’s just one of those things where we were kind rolling there and it was a good period, so we’ve just got to build off that.”
There had to be some juice on the bench, because as Schenn said in his remarks postgame, “I was dishing up pregame today and ‘Binner’ said ‘Fabs’ is going to score tonight, so I guess ‘Binner’ had the read on that one.”
Fabbri replied, “He actually chose the stick for me to use. Maybe we’ve got something going there.”
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But for there being not much life in the building, there was a glimpse of it now, and when Schenn made it 3-2 at 6:22 off a really nice pass by Jimmy Snuggerud, the place started to get some jump in it:
“I think Robby Fabbri got us going,” Montgomery said. ‘He had a big hit right before his goal and then we get the quick counter, 72 hitting nine, nine has some good poise. And then I think we got rolling. I really liked the line of [Dalibor] Dvorsky between Snuggerud and Schenn. Obviously they got the goals, but they just seemed to be going and making plays, 10-15 foot passes.”
The Stars seemed to have a hammerlock on the game late, but a fortuitous bounce finally went the Blues’ way when Harley’s clearing pass around the boards off referee Stephen Hiff right to Snuggerud, who found Schenn in the left circle and the captain roofed his shot at 15:50 to make it 3-3:
“Just attitude we’re going to come out in the third period and put a solid effort together for our fans,” Schenn said of the comeback. “At the end of the day, our special teams aren’t helping us right now and it’s tough falling behind 3-0 in this league against a good team, but I thought we came out in the third period and played hard for one another, inspired each other and like I said, close but not good enough.”
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The couple of older vets (Schenn and Fabbri) and a couple of young pups (Snuggerud and Dvorsky) fueled a comeback that nobody saw.
“Our effort, falling behind 3-0 and not quitting, having the perseverance to keep going,” Montgomery said. ‘We had lost two forwards; we were down to 10 forwards. It was nice to see that scrappy, never-say-die attitude that we had.”
* Special teams continue to be a problem – As Schenn mentioned above, the Blues’ special teams are anything but special this season.
They give up two more power-play goals, the third time in the past four games and fifth time in 10 games they’ve allowed multiple power-play markers.
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The first put Dallas up 1-0 when Matt Duchene scored the first of two goals in 40 seconds at 3:20 of the second period when Mikko Rantanen found a seam to deliver a dime of a pass to Duchene on the backdoor through Tucker and past Faulk:
And although the slashing penalty call by Hiff on Dvorsky was not a good one at 17:58 of the second, the Blues needed a kill to keep it a two-goal game and Roope Hintz scored eight seconds later for a 3-0 lead off a face-off win and one-timer from the interior of the right circle:
So for the night, the PK was 1-for-3 and the power play went 0-for-3 with one shot on goal. It simply isn’t good enough and it’s cost this group plenty this season.
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The PK is 29th at 73.9 percent, and the PP is 25th at 16.9 percent. Again, not nearly good enough.
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