By Rob Rains
There was one overriding reason that David Perron was pleased with his three-goal performance for the Blues on Thursday night: it led to a victory.
After going 0-1-1 to start the season, the Blues picked up their first win, 5-3 over the Calgary Flames at Enterprise Center.
“It’s always fun to score goals but if I didn’t score tonight and we got the win and played the right way, that’s all that matters,” Perron said.
The hat trick was the fourth of Perron’s career and his first since Oct. 22, 2016, also against Calgary.
His first goal, at 9:48 of the first period, broke a 1-1 tie as the Blues built a 3-1 lead after the first 20 minutes. He scored his second and third goals, both on power plays, in the second period and both came off passes from Brayden Schenn, who also had the primary assist on Perron’s first goal.
“He’s good with the puck, he’s able to make plays,” Schenn said of Perron. “He’s patient. Obviously it’s nice having a guy like that on our line.”
Perron, who returned to the Blues as a free agent over the summer, is skating on a line with Schenn and Jaden Schwartz, which coach Mike Yeo said could be a difficult assignment trying to find a fit with two quality players.
“It’s not easy playing with good players like Schwartz and Schenn; sometimes you put certain people there and they play a game to try to make them happy, to appease them and help them do their thing.” Yeo said. “But David has played with lots of good players in the league and that’s not going to bother him. He’s going to play his game.
“To me he’s looked a lot better the last couple of days in practice and he looked a lot better in the game tonight. He’s been moving his feet. He handled the week very well and he got rewarded for it tonight.”
Perron’s third goal came with 36 seconds left in the second period and opened a 5-1 lead, but a sloppy third period by the Blues let the Flames to narrow the margin and got Yeo’s attention, and he shared that displeasure with the team during a time out.
“It was disappointing that we allowed them to crawl back into the game,” Yeo said. “We have to learn from that. It’s too long of a year; that game could have turned and we could have lost the game. We had a few losses like that last year. We have to learn from this because we missed the playoffs by one point last year and we had games where we let our foot off the gas and let teams back into it. We have to be better.”
NOTES; Alexander Steen and Joel Edmundson scored the other goals for the Blues, each their first of the season. Edmundson did not play in the Blues’ first two games …
Calgary’s Sean Monahan was awarded a penalty shot in the first period when he was held on a breakaway attempt by Robert Bortuzzo, but his shot hit the post … The Blues also were able to kill off 1:35 of a 5-on-3 advantage in the second period after they had taken a 4-1 lead … Thursday night’s game began a stretch of six games in 12 nights for the Blues, who will play their first road game of the year on Saturday night in Chicago.
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