Flames Visual Recap 68: Poor defensive effort results in disappointing loss to Blues

The Calgary Flames have been on a bit of a skid lately, entering this game just 2-2-1 on their home stand. Looking for a win to turn things around, they faced off against the St. Louis Blues in the final meeting between the two teams of the season. The Blues played the night before as well in a loss to the Edmonton Oilers.

Game recap

This one did not get off to a good start. Just 54 seconds into the game, the Blues opened the scoring on a tip-in goal from Robert Thomas to beat Jacob Markstrom on the short side. A few minutes later though, Brett Ritchie scored on a scramble play in front of the net to tie the game at one apiece.

The Flames then took the lead midway through the first period on a beautiful top shelf tally from Johnny Gaudreau who was sprung on a partial break by Mikael Backlund. The lead didn’t last, however, as Ryan O’Reilly tied the game off a power play marker late in the period. The Flames heavily outshot the Blues in the first, putting 16 pucks on net to the Blues’ six.

In the second period, the Flames kept throwing pucks on Ville Husso, outshooting the Blues 12-4, but ended up surrendering the period’s only goal to Justin Faulk who put home a back-door feed from David Perron.

Desperately trying to tie things up in the final frame, Noah Hanifin finally scored on a messy play, but Ritchie was injured in the process. He went down the tunnel and did not return to the game.

It looked like the game was headed to overtime, but Nathan Walker scored the go-ahead goal with under two minutes left. Ivan Barbashev added an empty netter shortly afterwards. Dillon Dube did bat a puck into the net in the final minute to make things a bit more interesting, but Brandon Saad put home another empty netter to seal the deal.

Data visualisations of the game are below.