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…