Sharks at Blues
St. Louis Blues coach Craig Berube told reporters on Thursday that his team is intent on moving past the controversy that ended Game 3 of their Western Conference final and moving toward a better performance in Game 4. The host Blues aim to do precisely that on Friday when they bid to even the series at two wins apiece against the San Jose Sharks.
"It is hard (to move on), for sure. It's not easy to do. It's a test. That's how you look at it," Berube said Thursday. "It's a tough play, tough call, but it's just a test, and we've been tested over and over throughout the season and the playoffs, and I think we're pretty good at bouncing back. That's the way I look at it. It's a mental thing more than anything." The mental thing comes on the heels of the hand pass by San Jose's Timo Meier -- undetected by the officials and not reviewable under NHL rules -- that led to defenseman Erik Karlsson's goal 5:23 into overtime of a 5-4 win on Wednesday. "Well we weren't playing hand ball, were we? We were playing hockey, so I think we deserved to win this game," Karlsson said of the sequence leading to his overtime goal. The two-time Norris Trophy recipient joined the ageless Joe Thornton with two tallies in Game 3, with the 39-year-old becoming the oldest player in NHL history to record a multi-goal performance in a playoff game.
TV: 8 p.m. ET, NBC Sports Network, CBC, TVAS
ABOUT THE SHARKS: Lost in the hand-ball controversy was Martin Jones' performance in Game 3, as the oft-criticized netminder rebounded from yielding four goals in the second period to stop the next 15 shots that came his way. "It gets lost when we tie it up and win it in overtime," captain Joe Pavelski said. "But the critical saves he makes down the stretch ... (that) buys us some time to tie that thing up, were pretty important, pretty special." The term "pretty special" also describes the performance of Logan Couture, who has five goals and an assist in this series and 20 points (14 goals, six assists) in the postseason.
ABOUT THE BLUES: St. Louis' blue-line depth could be tested with Vince Dunn deemed day to day after his mouth was on the receiving end of a shot from San Jose defenseman Brenden Dillon on Wednesday. "He's very important," fellow blue-liner Jay Bouwmeester said of Dunn, who has seven points (two goals, five assists) in the playoffs after notching 35 (12 goals, 23 assists) in the regular season. "He's a guy that plays a lot of different situations, always on the power play. (At full strength), he's a guy that can skate and move the puck, helps to get it out of your end pretty clean." Carl Gunnarsson, who has been nursing a lower-body injury since Game 7 of the second-round series, would draw back in the lineup should Dunn be unable to play on Friday.
OVERTIME
1. Meier has seven points (two goals, five assists) in his last five games.
2. Blues LW David Perron has two goals and two assists during this series after mustering three points (one goal, two assists) in his previous 10 contests.
3. Sharks RW Kevin Labanc has three points (one goal, two assists) in the first three games of this series after recording just one in the seven-game set versus Colorado.