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 Minnesota's top line of left winger Zach Parise, center Mikael
Granlund and right winger Jason Pominville combined to score two
goals late in the second period, leading the Wild to a 3-0 win over
the Blues on Monday and a 2-1 lead in the teams' first-round Western
Conference playoff series.
The Blues got a 21-save performance from goalie Jake Allen, but they
were frustrated offensively all night and lost their ninth
consecutive playoff road game.
"Their team speed, when you let them have time and space to make
plays and zip the puck around, it's dangerous, and they've shown
that the whole second half of the year," said center David Backes,
the Blues' captain. "They got to show their speed and skill and
abilities tonight, and we were playing catch-up all night really
after the first period."
Parise and Pominville each had a goal and an assist, and Granlund
finished with two assists. Minnesota goalie Devan Dubnyk made 17
saves for his first career playoff shutout. Right winger Nino
Niederreiter added an empty-net goal. It was Dubnyk's first playoff
start with Minnesota's notoriously loud home crowd backing him.
"Certainly didn't disappoint," Dubnyk said. "It was crazy toward the
end of the second period there. You can't hear anything, you can't
hear whistles, you can't hear the pucks hitting sticks. You're
moving around deaf. We fed off of it."
The Wild finally gave the anxious crowd a reason to explode late in
the second period when Pominville scored his second goal of the
playoffs.
Granlund raced up the left side of the ice with the puck, skating
around Blues right winger Vladimir Tarasenko and winding up to
shoot, only to have the puck knocked away. Parise grabbed the loose
puck and zipped a pass to Pominville, who was uncovered at the side
of the crease. With Allen out of position, Pominville needed only to
tap the puck into the mostly empty net at 14:08.
"We were fortunate to get the first goal tonight," Wild coach Mike
Yeo said. "I thought we played a good game. Certainly getting that
first goal was a big factor in how the rest of the game played out.
Again, I like the way we started the game and the way we stuck with
it, and the one thing I did like was we didn't sit back after we got
that lead, we kept getting after it, and that's when we play our
best."
Two minutes later, Parise doubled Minnesota's lead. This time it was
Pominville feeding a pass to Parise, who was tied up with Blues
defenseman Jay Bouwmeester a dozen feet out from the top of the
crease. Parise whacked at the puck twice to get it free of the
defender, then zipped a slap shot past Allen before the goalie could
react.
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"That went off our D-man's stick," Allen said. "(Parise) shot it on
the ice and it hit our D-man's stick so fast it went top corner. He
didn't mean to shoot there."
The Parise-Pominville-Granlund trio was within inches of giving the
Wild a 3-0 early in the third. A crisp passing play left Allen out
of the crease and Granlund alone at the side of the net with the
puck and nothing but net to shoot at. However, Granlund missed,
clanking a shot off the side of the goal.
The three-goal lead for Minnesota finally came with 2:02 remaining
and Allen on the bench, when Niederreiter scored his first goal of
the playoffs.
"We turned the puck over in the neutral zone, fed their transition,"
Blues coach Ken Hitchcock said. "We had a good start, started
turning the pucks over, and they were on us fast. A lot of it was
what we did with the puck between the blue lines. That fed the
engine."
The Blues last won a road playoff game on April 19, 2012, beating
the Sharks 3-1 in San Jose.
NOTES: Wild RW Justin Fontaine returned to the lineup after missing
Game 2 with a stomach virus. Fontaine logged more than 11 minutes of
ice time in the series opener and had one assist. ... The hat trick
recorded by Blues RW Vladimir Tarasenko in Game 2 was the first the
Wild allowed in the playoffs, and the first recorded by St. Louis in
the postseason since Mike Sillinger scored three goals on April 12,
2004, vs. San Jose. ... While the Blues and Wild never met in the
playoffs prior to this season, the Blues and Minnesota North Stars
had nine head-to-head playoff series, including 1968, when they were
both first-year expansion teams. The Blues prevailed over the North
Stars in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals before being swept
in the Stanley Cup finals by the Montreal Canadiens.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
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