Three Takeaways From Blues’ 6-4 Loss Against Wild

Doug Armstrong was speaking to the media earlier in the day on Tuesday and was asked about his thoughts on the St. Louis Blues at the midway point and his expectations for the second half of the season.

“I think we’re in a spot where it’s very competitive,” the Blues’ GM said. “We have to put together some wins. We have to put together a streak. We have to get on a heater if we want to catch Vancouver or the teams ahead of Vancouver.

“We’ve played well. We’ve dropped some games recently that could come back and haunt us, and we’ve got to just make sure that every day we’re fighting.”

The “we’ve dropped some games recently that could come back and haunt us” part – again – reared its ugly head against the Minnesota Wild.

Despite overcoming a two-goal deficit, the Blues also blew a two-goal lead, a third-period lead against a depleted Wild lineup that pulled its starting goalie and dropped another bad loss, 6-4 to begin the second half of the season at Xcel Energy Center.

The Blues (19-19-4) fell behind 2-0 in the first two-plus minutes, then roared back to score four unanswered and had the game in control at that halfway through the game, but the Wild (26-11-4) rallied for three third-period goals to give the Blues their second regulation loss this season when leading after two periods.

The Blues once again score goals, and they’ve been scoring goals of late (31 in the past seven games), including back-to-back-to-back-to-back scoring four or more. But defensively and goaltending have not been consistent enough and it’s produced bad results as of late.

Pavel Buchnevich, Jordan Kyrou (power-play goal), Jake Neighbours and Robert Thomas all scored, but Jordan Binnington, who was solid going 3-1-0 with a 1.53 goals-against average and .929 save percentage his past four starts allowed five goals on 25 shots, good for an .800 save percentage.

Let’s look at the Three Takeaways:

* The Blues handled adversity, then they didn’t — Just 2:12 into the game, the Blues were down 2-0. And both goals were scored by d-men (Zack Bogosian and Jon Merrill) that score about as often as I do. One shouldn’t have counted because Mats Zuccarello should have been called for interference on Binnington, despite the goalie being out of his crease, since he had established his position where he was and the player making no attempt to avoid the contact:

But bad results, or non-calls, happen often, but the Blues, from that point on, I felt took the game over and won the last 10 minutes of the first period to only be down one after one, thanks to Buchnevich’s goal:

And in the second period, they firmly grasped the game by scoring three times in 3:09 thanks to Kyrou’s power-play goal at 1:24 to tie it 2-2, Neighbours’ beautiful tic-tac-toe goal after Tyler Tucker’s terrific stretch pass that started it to make it 3-2 Blues, then Thomas ending Filip Gustavsson’s night at 4:33 when Thomas made it 4-2:

From that moment on, not saying the Blues mailed it in, but the grit and determination of how they scored four in a row to overcome adversity suddenly disappeared, and for what?

That’s been the mindset far too often from this group and is a reason why they’ve allowed games to slip away.

Heck, coach Jim Montgomery saw it firsthand when he was coaching against the Blues when they frittered away a 2-0 lead against the Boston Bruins in the third period of a 3-2 loss on Nov. 12.

The Wild played grittier, they seemed more hungrier, and instead of the Blues squeezing the life out of a team missing its top scorer [Kirill Kaprizov] and its best defenseman [Brock Faber] going down halfway through the first period and Minnesota down to five defensemen, that’s when the Blues were in position to step on the Wild’s throats and they backed off.

Those are the kinds of teams that don’t make the playoffs.

* The Eriksson Ek goal changed everything — Up 4-2 halfway through the game, the Blues were in a good spot. Even leveling off their play, up two on the road, that’s a game the Blues should find a way to put away.

Even the goalie knows that, and for Binnington to give up the Eriksson Ek goal, it typified the night he had. And it wasn’t good enough.

That goal was one he has to save.

He’s down on one knee, five-hole exposed, not in a good position even with Colton Parayko, who did a flyby on Binnington when Bogosian made it 1-0 in the first, in position to take the middle of the ice away:

The goal came at 9:41 of the second period and gave the Wild life when they had none.

Minnesota gained energy off the goal when they were on a platter ready to be put out of its misery, and that subpar goal was the pep-me-up that fueled more energized play that the Blues then failed to match.

* Didn’t put the game away in the third period — Even with the momentum shift of the last half of the second period, the Blues were 14-1-1 when leading after two, and for a team in need of all the wins they can get, and understandably blown leads do happen, they couldn’t afford to begin the second half of the season like this, and that lead evaporated 1:16 into the third when Jake Middleton scored to make it 4-4 off a Parayuko neutral zone turnover, then Thomas didn’t make a play with the puck in the D-zone and lost it to Zuccarello. These are errors by the Blues’ best players:

And when Philip Broberg’s stick unfortunately snapped trying to make a play in the neutral zone that led to Matt Boldy’s go-ahead goal at 3:57, where was the pushback? There were a few moments, like Dylan Holloway’s wrister from the slot, but the Blues failed to put much, if any, pressure on 40-year-old Marc-Andre Fleury, who stopped all 15 shots he faced when he relieved Gustavsson.

When you score four goals in this league, more times than not, you should win. This is back-to-back games in which the Blues scored four — and lost (also 6-4 Saturday against the Columbus Blue Jackets) after winning their first 12 (12-2-0).

This loss reeks like losses against San Jose Sharks (4-3), like Buffalo Sabres (4-2, outplayed, outshot Sabres 37-16), Boston Bruins (3-2, led 2-0 after two), Philadelphia Flyers (2-1, tied 1-1 late), Utah Hockey Club (4-2, tied 2-2 late). That’s a lot of points left on the table for a team in dire need of them.

* Hear what coach Jim Montgomery and players said postgame: