MLive’s Ansar Khan posted his customary morning-after-the-game column today, discussing the Red Wings’ 6-2 loss to the St. Louis Blues on Thursday night. As Khan notes, two-goal-scorer Robby Fabbri and coach Jeff Blashill weren’t overly disappointed in the Wings’ team game against the Blues, but an inability to execute bit the Wings in the backside on more than one occasion. That was especially the case for Alex Nedeljkovic, who gave up 3 goals on 18 shots and took the loss:
“To me it was one of those nights where the puck seemed to go in,” Blashill said. “It wasn’t necessarily anybody’s fault. We had breakdowns, don’t get me wrong, but they had breakdowns where we had chances and the puck didn’t go in. For them it did.”
Blashill said his team had as many opportunities, if not more than the Blues, who got a 29-save performance from Charlie Lindgren.
“I thought they were harder at the net, and they had a better net presence than us,” Blashill said. “That’s the one thing if you look at all their goals, they did a real good job at the net. I thought we lost our game a little bit in the third, especially in our zone on a couple of big breakdowns. But it wasn’t a game where I was disappointed with our effort. Again, I thought through two periods it probably should’ve been a tie game or a one-goal game one way or the other.”
After [Nathan] Walker scored twice in the first period, Fabbri cut his team’s deficit to 2-1 at 4:17 of the second.
Even after Colton Parayko scored at 16:01 of the second to give the Blues back their two-goal lead, the Red Wings had ample time to mount a comeback.
Those hopes were all but dashed when Walker deflected in a shot at 9:27 of the third period to give St. Louis a 4-1 lead.
“I thought we didn’t play horrible tonight,” Fabbri said. “We gave up some things, but we worked, we sustained some pressure in the O-zone. We just didn’t get enough bodies in front of the net. Lindgren was seeing a lot of the shots, so we made it easy for him.”
