ST. LOUIS — The skating, scoring Blues are 4-0 for the first time since 2017-18 after beating the Los Angeles Kings, 7-3, before a raucous sellout crowd of 18,096 at Enterprise Center. But don’t make plans for the Stanley Cup parade down Market Street just yet. That ’17-18 team under coach Mike Yeo started 13-3-1 ... and missed the playoffs by a point.
But 4-0 is better than 0-4. And the Blues did beat the pesky Kings, who gave them fits last season going 5-1-2 against the Blues. The teams will do it again on Monday with a rematch at Enterprise.
After a skittish start, this one was almost too easy for the Blues, who scored six straight goals from late in the first period to early in the third.
David Perron scored his sixth NHL hat trick, five if which has come with the Blues. James Neal scored his first goal as a member of the Blues. And rookie Jake Neighbours scored his first goal in the NHL.
But the man who lit the fuse for St. Louis was Ivan Barbashev.
Barbashev has scored three goals in a game — he had a hat trick against Detroit on March 21, 2019, the Blues’ Stanley Cup year. But he’s never had goals in three consecutive games. Until Saturday, that is. With the Kings on the power play late in the first period, Marco Scandella swatted the puck of the neutral zone. Barbashev got a piece of the puck right around the far blue line.
It rolled a few feet away, but Barbashev was able to gain control and then swoop in to beat Kings goalie Calvin Petersen with a wicked backhand to snap a 1-1 tie with 73 seconds left in the opening period.
It was the ninth short-handed goal of Barbashev’s NHL career, which is now in its sixth season. He had an empty-net goal to clinch Wednesday’s 3-1 victory over Vegas, and scored a five-on-five goal in Monday’s 7-4 triumph at Arizona.
So three games and one period into the 2021-22 season, Barbashev was just a power-play goal short of a hockey “grand slam” — with a five-on-five, short-handed and empty-net goal.
“I had 'Barby' before in the minors and he scored 30 goals,” Blues coach Craig Berube said. “He has the ability to make plays. He’s got pretty good offensive instincts.”
A short-handed goal can be a momentum boost, and in this case the momentum carried over into the second period and on to the third. Just 45 seconds into the second, the Blues added to their lead when Torey Krug blasted a one-timer from just inside the blueline. Perron got a piece of the puck as it trickled off Petersen and into the net.
That made it two two-goal games for Perron, who also netted a deuce in the season opener against Colorado.
The Blues were just getting loose in the second period. Less than two minutes after Perron’s second goal, Brayden Schenn patiently skated around the back of the LA net, surveying the landscape and then sending a beauty of a pass to Neighbours, who had circled toward the net front.
The tap-in marked Neighbours’ first NHL goal. Colton Parayko retrieved the puck for Neighbours. And when P.A. announcer Tom Calhoun announced that it was Neighbours’ first NHL goal, most in the packed house at Enterprise gave him a standing ovation.
The Blues weren’t quite done scoring in the second. Just 4 1/2 minutes later, after Alex Edler was sent off for hooking Parayko, Schenn was back at it in terms of nifty assists. With the Blues whipping the puck around on the power play with ease, Schenn got the puck along the goal line and fed Ryan O’Reilly, who with a quick whack at the puck from the front of the crease made it a 5-1 game.
Keep in mind Petersen had been ultra-tough in his previous six games against the Blues. He was 3-1-2 over his brief NHL career against St. Louis with a 1.67 goals-against average and a .935 save percentage. So in those six previous games, Petersen had allowed just 10 goals. He allowed five Saturday in less than 1 1/2 periods, and the seven goals total he allowed was a career high.
Way back when, the Kings actually took a 1-0 lead on an Alex Iafallo goal 11 1/2 minutes into the contest. He beat Jordan Binnington from the left circle. The Blues seemed a little tight at the outset, with a full house on hand in their home opener and player introductions prior to puck drop.
The Kings were all over the Blues in the early going, outshooting them 11-3 over the first 12 1/2 minutes.
But in the lead-up to this game, Berube talked to the team about maintaining their energy at home, and not getting down if something bad happened. You know, like an Iafallo goal. Berube said he sensed that happened more at home, and not nearly as much as the road.
But it didn’t happen Saturday. With 5:34 left in the first period, and little more than three minutes after Iafallo’s goal, Perron scored his first goal of the night — a power-play tally from the top of the left circle off a feed from Krug.
That tied the game at 1-1 and started a string of six consecutive goals by the Blues. The last of those six came from Neal just 38 seconds into the third period on the power play. (The Kings committed a lot of penalties Saturday, particularly a lot of tripping penalties.)
Neal’s goal meant that every member of the Blues roster who has played this season has a least one point. Defenseman Niko Mikkola has yet to play.
As was the case against Vegas and Arizona, the Blues relaxed a little too much with a big lead in the third period. On this night, Dustin Brown and Carl Grundstrom made it 6-3 with goals in the early minutes of the third.
But Perron took care of that when he scored the Blues’ fourth power play goal to make it a 7-3 game with 8:20 left to play.
