Minnesota @ St. Louis preview
Enterprise Center
Last Meeting ( Nov 28, 2023 ) St. Louis 1, Minnesota 3
The St. Louis Blues and Minnesota Wild currently find themselves on the outside looking in at the Western Conference playoffs.
Their Central Division showdown on Saturday in St. Louis carries great importance, however.
The Blues are just 2-5-1 in their past eight games, but they stepped up their effort during a 3-2 overtime loss at Edmonton on Wednesday night. Oilers superstar captain Connor McDavid beat them with a late OT goal.
"Loved the effort of our guys," Blues interim coach Drew Bannister said. "I thought we dug in tonight. Disappointed for the guys that we weren't able to get a win, but a lot of positives we can take from that game moving forward.
"We'll take the point. We're not happy with it, but we'll take it and move forward and build on this."
Prior to facing the Oilers, the Blues had suffered an ugly 6-1 loss to the Red Wings in Detroit last Saturday and a 4-2 loss to the Jets at Winnipeg Tuesday. They mustered a better performance Wednesday while playing the second game in as many nights.
"It's not easy coming on a back-to-back obviously," Blues goaltender Jordan Binnington said. "We fought hard. Guys played a lot of minutes the last two days, especially on the back end.
"They really dug in and we gave ourselves a chance to win. It's an unfortunate outcome, but guys really played hard and we left it on the ice."
The Wild are coming off a flat performance at Nashville in a 6-1 loss to the Predators.
"I thought from a competitive standpoint, we weren't close to where we needed to be in a lot of areas of the ice," Minnesota coach John Hynes said. "You could arguably say tonight we got what we deserved. We didn't put enough into the game that gives you a chance to win this time of the year and you saw the end result.
"We lost the game in the hard areas of the game, the competitiveness. We talked to the team before the game about the team that's going to be the most competitive is going to win the hockey game, and we certainly were not that tonight."
Forward Mats Zuccarello noted that the Wild can't afford to let the malaise linger after losing their last two games.
"Obviously, we're disappointed in here," he said. "We come in here and we want to play a good game in an important game. I think it's important that we don't get too down. There's still a lot of games to play and we know we can hopefully play better than this."
Minnesota has squandered a one-goal lead in five of its past six losses. And overall the Wild have lost 10 of their 15 games against Central Division rivals.
The Wild won their previous game against the Blues 3-1 on Nov. 28 in Hynes' first game after replacing Dean Evason as coach. Matt Boldy, Joel Eriksson Ek and Frederick Gaudreau scored for Minnesota in that game and Filip Gustavsson made 23 saves.
Colton Parayko scored for the Blues and Binnington made 34 saves.
--Field Level Media