ST. LOUIS — Jordan Greenway knew the Enterprise Center was going to be lit on Friday night for Game 3 between the Wild and the St. Louis Blues.
His goal? Make sure the home crowd in St. Louis stayed as quiet as possible.
“Sometimes you thrive in those situations where the other team’s fans are giving it to you or whatever the case is,” Greenway said. “Then other times it’s great to know they have nothing to cheer about.”
The latter played out across 60 minutes of regulation in Game 3 as the Wild led wire-to-wire in a convincing 5-1 win over the Blues.
While the home crowd was deafening at puck drop, exactly as Greenway expected, he personally zapped the energy out of the building less than a minute into the game. That stunned the Blues fans in attendance, if only for a moment, and Kirill Kaprizov silenced them completely a couple of minutes later with a goal of his own.
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That put the Wild in the driver’s seat and they controlled the game the rest of the way. Meanwhile, the Blues showed their frustration time and time again, seemingly seeking out big hits rather than big goals.
With the win, the Wild now lead the best-of-seven series 2-1 over the Blues. When a best-of-seven series is tied 1-1, the winner of Game 3 holds an all-time series record of 228-110 (.675). In other words, the Wild are in good shape heading into Game 4, which is scheduled to be played on Sunday afternoon.
The result was somewhat surprising considering how poorly the Wild have played in the Enterprise Center over the past few seasons. In that span, the Wild had a dreadful 0-4-3 record in the building, and the Blues had outscored them 35-15 in those games.
As everyone knows, though, the playoffs are a different animal, and apparently so is this version of the Wild once it gets there.
The game was never in question from the moment Greenway put the Wild in front 1-0 shortly after puck drop. He did so in rather emphatic fashion, hammering home a perfect pass from Joel Eriksson Ek on an odd-man rush.
With the home crowd trying to will the home team back into the game, Kaprizov stretched the Wild lead to 2-0 thanks a fortuitous bounce in front. After initially being denied on a breakaway, Kaprizov stuck with it, backhanded a shot toward the net, and somehow banked the puck off of Blues goaltender Ville Husso.
With the game starting to calm down in the second period, Mats Zuccarello took a pass from Kirill Kaprizov and promptly wired a shot past Husso to make it 3-0 in favor of the Wild.
While that made the third period nothing more than a formality at that point, Eriksson Ek netted the dagger less than a minute into the frame to make it 4-0. A couple of minutes later, Blues captain Ryan O’Reilly finally got his team on the board, beating Marc-Andre Fleury clean to make it 4-1.
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That’s as close as the game got with Jonas Brodin tacking on an empty-netter to finalize the score at 5-1.
