ST. LOUIS -- Robert Thomas and Philip Broberg each had a goal and two assists, and the St. Louis Blues ended a two-game scoring drought in a 4-1 win against the Boston Bruins at Enterprise Center on Thursday.
“That’s one of the hottest teams in the League,” Thomas said of the Bruins. “I thought we played them really well all game.
It feels great.”
Jimmy Snuggerud and Jake Neighbours also scored for the Blues (6-6-1), who lost 4-0 to the Carolina Hurricanes 4-0 on Saturday and 2-0 to the Montreal Canadiens on Tuesday. Joel Hofer made 31 saves, including 14 in the third period, to help St. Louis end a five-game homestand at 3-2-0.
“What we want to take away from it is 3-2, but we probably should have been 4-1, and we played the elite in the League,” St. Louis coach Jim Montgomery said of the homestand, which also included wins against the Winnipeg Jets and Vegas Golden Knights. “All five teams that came in here.
We played really good teams, we matched up well and three of the last four games playing to what I believe is our identity. You can see the process starting to come and that we’re playing real good hockey.
In three of those games, we outplayed really good hockey teams.”
James Hagens scored for the Bruins (9-4-1), who lost both games of a two-game road trip following an eight-game point streak (7-0-1). Jeremy Swayman made 14 saves.
“Even the games we won lately, we were just making sloppy mistakes, and it finally caught up to us a little bit on this road trip,” Boston coach Marco Sturm said. “But besides that, the effort today, especially the first 40 minutes, was pretty bad.
That for me was the most disappointing thing.”
St. Louis scored four straight goals after falling behind early in the first period.
Snuggerud tied it 1-1 on the power play at 15:43 with the Blues’ first goal in a span of 139:38. Thomas won a face-off in the right circle to Broberg, who moved the puck to the middle of the ice and passed to Snuggerud for a one-timer from the left circle.
“It’s a play we’ve been working on,” Snuggerud said. “I think the puck kind of ended up in a really good spot where (Broberg) was able to sink down and kind of find me on that one-timer there.
I didn’t get a hold of it really well, but fortunately it went in.”
Broberg made it a 2-1 lead at 5:17 of the second period. Connor McMichael brought the puck out from behind the net on the right side and fed Broberg for a wide-open wrist shot from the high slot.
He beat Swayman bar down in the top right corner.
“Seeing open space and ‘Mikey’ made a great play there finding me,” Broberg said. “It was nice to see it go in.”
Thomas extended it to 3-1 at 12:08. He took a pass from Justin Barron at the offensive blue line, moved into the high slot and beat Swayman with a wrist shot into the top left corner.
“I haven’t shot the puck a lot lately,” Thomas said. “It was nice to get in a good area and rip it.
Nice to see one go in.
“I was looking pass.
Just kept skating and eventually I shot it.”
Neighbours pushed the margin to 4-1 with a power-play goal at 12:42 of the third. After another Thomas face-off win, Broberg’s shot from the top of the slot was blocked, but Neighbours slipped the loose puck through Swayman’s five-hole.
Hagens gave the Bruins a 1-0 lead at 5:28 of the first. Casey Mittelstadt picked off Hofer’s pass up the boards and sent the puck in from the left side before Hagens redirected it past the glove.
“(Hampus Lindholm) did a good job of forcing it,” Mittelstadt said of the turnover. “I’m just trying to beat the winger to the puck and I saw ‘Hages’ pretty open.
It was a heck of a tip and a good start, and obviously it would have been nice to build on it a little bit better than we did.”
NOTES: The Blues defeated the Bruins on home ice for the first time since Game 4 of the 2019 Stanley Cup Final. They had been 0-2-3 against them since.
After the game, St. Louis assigned forward Otto Stenberg to Springfield of the American Hockey League.
Hagens tied Phil Kessel (16 games in 2006-07) as the fastest Boston teenager in the past 20 years to score five career goals.
Bruins defenseman Connor Clifton had two shots on goal and was minus-1 in 14:12 of ice time after being a healthy scratch for the previous seven games.
