New York Islanders play host to St. Louis Blues-Nassau Coliseum
The first game of Saturday was hosted by the New York Islanders at the Nassau Coliseum as they will be up against the St. Louis Blues. This will be one and only game between the two teams during the course of the season. St. Louis Blues have won their last two meetings during the course of the last season 4-1 and 2-1 respectively.
A successful season can during into a dreadful season after a decent start. This is what has happened with the Blues. The Blues have come up with some poor performances recently as they have lost six out of their last seven games. They are ten points out of the final position in the play-off cut with only a couple of weeks left to play. If the Blues want to make it into the cut then they need to step up their pace as things are heating up. The Islanders had disastrous first half of the season that saw them bottom of the league table and their hopes for a play-off spot are all over.
The Islanders came up with a decent performance that saw the Islanders winning the game 4-1 against the Minnesota Wild. The Islanders has been hurt quite a lot by injuries and suspension. However, they were able to deal with this during the course of their last game as forward Blake Comeau ended with two goals and three assists.
Their defence has also received a lot of boost with the goal keeper out playing his counterparts. During the course of the game, Al-Montoya goal keeper of the Islanders came up with a 33 saves performance.
"It's obviously really encouraging," Andrew MacDonald said. "We were pretty happy with the way we were moving the puck around on the power play. We weren't really getting results, weren't shooting enough. Tonight it was really good to get that monkey off our back."
The Islanders have played 65 games during the course of the season out of which they have won 24 games in regulation time, nine games in overtime to score a total of 57 points. On the other hand, the Blues have played 64 games out of which they have won 28 games in regulation time, nine games in overtime to score a total of 65 points.
The Blues are still hanging in there with the play-off position still in doubts. They have been one of those teams that have seen a sharp decline in their performances with the main reason being the fact that their offence hasn’t been able to perform to the best of its abilities.
In their last game against the Carolina Hurricanes the Blues managed to end their goalless drought of 133 minutes when they scored through Alexander Steen. However, they lost the game 3-2 in the end."The 15 minutes left in the third against Calgary were pretty atrocious," David Backes said. "But tonight we played a much more solid 60 minutes. But mistakes against teams that are playing really good hockey are going to make you pay, and they did that tonight.
"We need to find a way to win games. There's no question that's a good team, but if we plan on being a good team we need to find ways to play with the best."
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