Even Series: St. Louis Blues found their game at home to set stage for the unthinkable

ST. LOUIS — If the outcome to Game 4 was to be determined by how it started, the St. Louis Blues wouldn’t have been long for the matchup on Sunday.

After a lightning fast start in front of a raucous crowd on Thursday night, the Blues took some time to wake up on Sunday afternoon at Enterprise Center.

But once they found their game, the outcome was virtually identical to the one before it:

The Blues won, big.

Connor Hellebuyck hit the showers early. Enterprise Center was the biggest party of the sports day in downtown St. Louis.

The Blues did previously would have sounded impossible, seemingly breaking the spirit of the Winnipeg Jets and their Vezina finalist goaltender en route to a 5-1 win. The Note scored three second-period goals to skate by the Jets and even up the Stanley Cup Playoffs series at 2-2. 

In the beginning, the Blues relied on Jordan Binnington to carry them through the early moments of the game. The skaters weren’t nearly as crisp as what we saw to open Thursday’s game at Enterprise Center.

First period: It was a slow build for the Blues

The Blues got the first call of the game but it was the only one they drew during the opening period. Vladislav Namestnikov upended Jordan Kyrou to put the Blues on an early man-advantage, but the Note didn’t buzz like we saw from the outset of Game 3. The refs arguably missed a takedown of Zach Bolduc that could have led to a 5-on-3 for St. Louis, after which the Blues didn’t generate enough during the power play to cash in.

A roughing call on Pavel Buchnevich incited the crowd as the replay didn’t make the forward’s infraction clear. Whatever he did to earn the roughing call, he did it from his backside after being checked to the ground. 

Oskar Sundqvist took a shot into the boards behind the Jets net during the ensuing penalty kill, one of several first-period moments that the fans wanted to see an official raise an arm but were not indulged.

The league’s top power play unit had its chances, but Binnington came up with key denials to keep the game scoreless.

Another call went against the Blues shortly thereafter as Tyler Tucker went to the box for tripping. While the Blues didn’t seem to be moving as aggressively on this PK, they clogged the lanes effectively enough to avoid prime chances until late in the two-minute clock, when Binnington came up with a key stop and smother from his belly in the middle of the crease to end a Winnipeg threat.

The Blues goaltender looked sharp early, but wasn’t getting the help from his defense that he needed—too many dangerous chances during extended possessions for the opposition.

The dam was due to break eventually, and it finally happened on a sequence in which the Blues had numerous chances to get the puck out of the zone and just couldn’t close the sequence. 

When the Blues did find some rare time in the offensive zone during the first period, the Jets crowded the net front with a purpose. Shooting lanes were clogged and chances weren’t especially threatening. But in those moments, Blues coach Jim Montgomery wants to see his team push through and continue sticking to their intended process. 

After the Blues saluted a U.S. military veteran celebrating his 103rd birthday during a stoppage late in the first period, St. Louis got him a goal—in a workmanlike fashion as Montgomery likes to see—to wash away a lot of the stink from a lackluster 20 minutes of hockey.

As is his specialty, Jake Neighbours found work in the dirty areas. After a face-off win, Neighbours parked it in front of the net, where he was able to redirect a knuckler from Colton Parayko to beat Connor Hellebuyck with a mere 22.7 seconds remaining on the first-period clock. 

The timeliness of Neighbours finding paydirt to conclude an otherwise disappointing showing cleaned the slate like a Zamboni during the intermission—and gave St. Louis an opportunity to turn this Stanley Cup Playoffs series on its head.

“Yes,” Jim Montgomery said of the Neighbours goal being a mood-lifter for his hockey team heading into intermission after the way the period had played out to that point. “Because they did dominate or territorially have the advantage the last 10 minutes or so. And to get that deflection goal, being at the net front, something we’re trying to do offensively, and get rewarded for it, I think it gave us the confidence to keep standing at the net front and our defensemen to keep pounding pucks.”

Second period: Stick to your game, and the floodgates open

The Blues took time to ease into the second period, but slowly you started to see a more crisp brand of hockey. The looks started coming for St. Louis and during one extended sequence midway through the period, Alexandre Texier made a strong push to the puck to narrowly keep it in the zone, keeping a weary Jets unit on its heels for even longer.

Though the Blues had seemed just a step slow or a tick behind linking up with their puck movement for much of the day to that point, Texier and Nick Leddy dialed up a tic-tac-toe for Tyler Tucker after digging the puck out of the corner. Leddy dished to Tucker at the point to set up a clean look and Tucker delivered an impressive shot, ripping the puck past Hellebuyck for his first-career Stanley Cup Playoffs goal.

The go-ahead tally was a real team-goal as Oskar Sundqvist was the unsung hero of the sequence, baiting a defender across Hellebuyck’s face, providing timely cover for Tucker to deposit the puck directly into Hellebuyck’s blind spot for the goal.

From there, the Blues just needed to find an opening. Tack on one more goal, and you’re well on your way to breaking the spirit of one of the best goaltenders in the league for the second straight game.

Tyler Tucker was quickly back in the spotlight again, drawing a penalty on Adam Lowry to set up a power play for the Blues that seemed like a prime moment for the Blues to cement a series-shifting goal.

As fate would have it, the ensuing two-minute sequence was arguably the Blues’ worst power play of the series—they failed to generate even one quality look during the two minutes.

But as the power play was ending, Jordan Binnington aggressively moved the puck out of the zone just as the Jets were returning to full strength. The timing of the play kept Lowry out of the play long enough for the Blues to effectively keep their edge for one more push toward the net. 

Parayko dropped it off in the crease and Hellebuyck simply couldn’t smother it—easy pickings for Brayden Schenn on the clean-up crew.

Justin Faulk tallied another goal in the waning moments of the period as the Blues capped off a 3-0 middle period.

The Jets were on the ropes. The next goal would send them straight over the edge.

Third period: Bye Bye, Connor!

Though it wasn’t clear until the puck dropped on the third period whether the Jets would dig deep and find some resolve, it didn’t take long to reveal that the damage within the context of the game had already been done—the Blues had broken the Jets spirit.

A potential odd-man rush for Winnipeg early in the third somehow turned into a Blues goal as the Jets coughed up the puck to give St. Louis numbers heading the other way.

Sundqvist had more space than he knew what to do with, and opted to drop the puck off for a hard-charging Robert Thomas.

That’s the point at which the Blues had officially broken Connor Hellebuyck, who was yanked from the ice for the second straight game. 

“It’s playoffs and you have to win the net front battle, you have to go to the net,” Brayden Schenn reiterated when asked how they’ve managed to beat a goaltender of Hellebuyck’s caliber so soundly for the past two games. It boils down to a simple, aggressive frame of mind.

“Not even just our series, but if you just look league-wide right now, how pucks and goals are going in in the playoffs, they’re not always all pretty. It’s such a cliche answer, but you get pucks and people and traffic to the net and shoot the puck—hopefully good things happen.”

The Blues used a simple mindset to deliver exceptional results in the past two games at home. With the series now tied up, translating that success behind enemy lines in Winnipeg is the final step of their evolution throughout this series before setting up a potential clincher in St. Louis on Friday night.

The Jets won the Presidents’ Trophy, and having the most points in the NHL in the regular season has earned them the luxury to not have to win a game in anybody else’s building in this series.

But the Blues have crystallized a determination about them as this series has gone along—stunning the Jets in Winnipeg on Wednesday night could give the Blues the upperhand in pulling off a series upset that few would have saw coming less than a week ago.