ST. LOUIS (KDVR) — The Colorado Avalanche hit the ice hard scoring two goals in the first three minutes of the game but the St. Louis Blues rallied back to win 5-3 on Saturday afternoon.
Cale Makar opened it up for the Avalanche with a power-play goal just over a minute and a half into the start. Gabriel Landeskog got a wrap around pass from Makar to put it past Jordan Binnington for the second goal of the game.
The Blues came back midway through the first period with three goals to take the lead of the contest. Ryan O’Reilly scored two and Ivan Barbashev put the go-ahead goal past Devan Dubnyk with just over two minutes left in the period.
Nathan MacKinnon scored the lone goal of the second period to tie it up. The teams played a north south game with multiple turnovers on both sides of the ice.
Mike Hoffman scored on a 5-on-3 at 11:19 in the third period. O’Reilly earned a hat trick for the game with an empty-netter at 18:25.
”Special teams, they were good,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said. ”Tonight was a 5-on-5 game. We let them back into it playing the track meet style and we left it to chance because we had those chances in the first period. Probably some of those best chances are the ones we didn’t score on in the first.”
The teams meet for the last time of the season on Monday night. The Avalanche secured a spot in the Stanley Cup playoffs with the win over the Blues on Thursday night. The Blues are fighting to make it in battling with the Arizona Coyotes for the final spot in the Honda West division.