Another St. Louis Blues game that comes down to the wire, or where one shot wins a game. Seems to be common in this first third of the season.
The Blues were playing the second of a back-to-back against the defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers at Amerant Bank Arena on Friday.
Coming off a 3-1 loss against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Thursday, what would the Blues have in the tank? Well, plenty.
Another game of missed opportunities that came down to the end, and Aleksander Barkov’s power-play goal with 17 seconds left in overtime gave the Panthers a 2-1 win, sending the Blues (15-16-4) to their third straight loss (0-2-1).
It was another solid team performance but one that again goes by the wayside without two points the Blues fought hard to get but come up short.
Oskar Sundqvist scored the lone goal and Joel Hofer made 25 saves to end his four-game winning streak.
Let’s get into the Three Takeaways from the game:
* Offensive woes continue — We can copy and paste Thursday night’s analysis. Great scoring chances, no goals.
The Blues outshot the Lightning 32-18 on Thursday and had ample scoring chances but couldn’t solve Andrei Vasilevskiy.
Insert same analysis, switch the goalie.
This time, it was another Russian: Sergei Bobrovsky, who made 26 saves.
The Blues had a 3-on-1 and a 2-on-1 in the first five minutes of the game they couldn’t score on.
Zack Bolduc tried to sauce a pass to Scott Perunovich that was off the mark instead of shooing on the 3-on-1, and Jake Neighbours was stopped on the 2-on-1, electing to keep. He had another 2-on-1 in the third period with Robert Thomas that he was also stopped on.
Dylan Holloway had two terrific chances in overtime that ‘Bob’ made saves on as well.
Those were among some of the top chances in the game, but for the fourth time in five games and 10th time in 35, the Blues can’t score but one goal in a game, asking a lot from their goalies to steal points in those instances.
But in the past week, Hofer and Jordan Binnington helped get a point in matching 2-1 OT losses.
* Power play had chance to give Blues lead twice — OK, it looked better on Friday with six shots on goal, and a couple terrific looks by Jordan Kyrou, particularly one in which he got a great seam pass from Pavel Buchnevich that was saved, but the bottom line is it’s now 0-for-10 the past six games,…