Wintry mix spreads across Minnesota

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Brayden Schenn scored 56 seconds into overtime and the St. Louis Blues wrapped up a playoff spot, beating the Minnesota Wild 6-5 on Saturday for their season-high eighth straight victory.

Vladimir Tarasenko, Ivan Barbashev, David Perron, Brandon Saad and Pavel Buchnevich scored in regulation and Ville Husso made 31 saves.

“This league's not easy,” Schenn said. “There's a lot of teams that are very capable of making the playoffs and all you have to do is get in and you've got a chance."

Schenn ended it after Minnesota rallied with a four-goal third period. The Blues swept the season series against Minnesota, their likely first-round opponent, and reached the 100-point mark for the ninth time

Ryan Hartman scored twice for Minnesota and Frederick Gaudreau, Marcus Foligno and Kirill Kaprizov added goal. Cam Talbot made 24 saves, pushing his career-high points streak to 12 games.

“I don’t think it’s one specific situation that we can say our D zone was poor, our rush chances were bad." Wild coach Dean Evason said. "They’ve got as good an offensive team as there is so, you have to obviously defend a little bit better against that group. But you have to continue to push like we did in the third period offensively because they’re going to get theirs, so we’ve got to get ours too.”

Hartman banked a shot off Blues defenseman Marco Scandella’s stick for his second of the game early in the third period, and Gaudreau scored at 4:41 to cut the deficit to one.

“They’re able to play fast because they get pucks out of their zone and they’re able to just go without worrying about it, and I think we were able to do that there in the third,” Hartman said. “They came back on us last time to tie it up and go to overtime and we did the same. So it was nice to be able to tie that game.”

Buchnevich scored at 9:15 to extend his points streak to a career-high nine games, with six goals and 10 assists.

“He was excellent tonight," Blues coach Craig Berube said about Buchnevich. "I thought he was probably our best forward tonight. From just skating, making plays, being hard on pucks, penalty killing, all of that kind of stuff. He had a real good game.”

Minnesota tied it with two goals 58 seconds apart. Foligno had a power-play goal and Kaprizov scored on a one-timer with 5:02 left. Kaprizov has 43 goals, the most in a season in franchise history.

“It feels good to get the 43rd goal,” Kaprizov said through an interpreter. “It really sucks to be able to come back all the way, push it to overtime, and end up losing. Those are always the toughest games.”

“We probably were in a real good spot, but again, we just let them come at us too much," Blues coach Craig Berube said. “I’ll give them credit, that Kaprizov is a dangerous player. He’s hard to handle and I just think we gave up our blue line too much, too easily to that line.”

St. Louis has scored four or more goals in a franchise-high 11 straight games.

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The Associated Press

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 The Blues swept the season series against Minnesota, their likely first-round opponent, and reached the 100-point mark for the ninth time

Brayden Schenn scores in OT to lift Blues past Wild, 6-5

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