The Sharks found out Sunday night just how hard it will be to score power play goals and get pucks past St. Louis Blues goalie Brian Elliott. Sharks goaltender Martin Jones didn’t have his best game as he allowed a very weak goal to Lehtera.
Advertisement
Once again Elliott left the opposition frustrated.
While the Blues got the jump on the Sharks in the first game, this series has a marathon look to it.
“It was that way for the first two rounds”, Backes added, “and nothing’s changed in Game 1 of the third round”. “Just keep it simple”.
The Sharks tied the game at 1-1, 34 seconds later on a double deflection by Joe Pavelski and then Tomas Hertl. Pavelski and Elliott were roommates at Wisconsin.
“Well, we were told not to whine for calls, so we’re not going to whine for calls”, he said. “No, I just have to find a way to put that in, regardless of what goes on. I thought it was going in”.
Blues coach Ken Hitchcock, informed of those comments, wanted to know whether DeBoer was whining for calls..
“Are you kidding me?” We got through it though, so there’s a good feeling that we won a hockey where we were not close to our best.
The Blues ranked ninth in the National Hockey League during the regular season with 861 penalty minutes and they are second during the playoffs with 163 penalty minutes.
The Blues came out and played a physical, aggressive game that had them outhitting San Jose by a 2-to-1 margin (28-14). On the last two San Jose power plays, they cleared the puck all 10 times they had a chance. “That’s the way it is going to be the rest of the series”. We stepped up to the challenge like that, it was a big topic for us all week.
“We probably had more quality chances than they did”, Sharks coach Pete DeBoer said Monday morning, about 13 hours after his team’s 2-1 loss to the Blues at Scottrade Center.
The Sharks outshot the Blues 16-5 in the period, and the Blues didn’t register their first until 7:26 had elapsed.
“I just got the puck and I closed my eyes and I shot it”, Lehtera said.
Think there’s something between the coaches with Sharks coach Peter DeBoer saying the Blues are the most penalized teams? “St. Louis is one of the most penalized teams in the league, regular season and playoffs”. Blues defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk and forward Jaden Schwartz picked up the assists on Backes’ goal. “There’s where he’s so valuable”.
The goalie’s refusal to be beaten included a spell of ferocious pressure in the second period when he saved all 16 shots by San Jose. Backchecking on the play, the Sharks’ Chris Tierney got a piece of Lehtera’s stick as it went to meet the puck, but the centre got enough wood to sneak it through Jones for his second goal of the post-season. San Jose also got off to a 2-0 start against Nashville in the second round and while the Predators would rally back to extend the series to seven games, at no point did the Predators have the series edge over San Jose.
Sidney Crosby turned the Conference Final round of the playoffs into a much more compelling event when his slap shot at 40 seconds of overtime beat Tampa Bay goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy.
Before Lehtera notched the game-winning goal, the Blues jumped out to a 1-0 lead by capitalizing on their first power play opportunity of the series. Dillon had played in just two playoff games before this season, both with the Dallas Stars in 2014. It was Backes’ seventh goal of the postseason. There were no surprises in the scratches.
Three of the Sharks five shots on the power play came in the opening shift of their first attempt with the man advantage early in the first period.
Advertisement
This story has been corrected to show San Jose was 0 for 3 on power play instead of 0 for 5.
