Salo gives St. Louis the blues
Last Updated: Saturday, October 21, 2006 | 9:11 AM ET
The Associated Press
Sami Salo scored with less than a second left in overtime to give the Vancouver Canucks a 3-2 victory over the St. Louis Blues on Friday night.
Vancouver's Markus Naslund tied the game with a power-play goal with 25 seconds left in regulation.
The clock showed 0:00 after Salo went around a sprawling Dallas Drake and fired a wrist shot past Blues goalie Curtis Sanford. The referees reviewed the goal and determined it came before time had expired.
The Canucks' Kevin Bieska, far left, blasts a shot into a wall of Blues defenders during the second period of Friday's game in St. Louis.
(Kyle Ericson/Associated Press)
"I thought there would be time for one move," Salo said. "So that's what I did and just found a hole."
The victory ended a string of futility for the Canucks, who lost all four meetings between the two teams last season, when the Blues finished with the league's worst record.
Besides losing the game, St. Louis lost defenceman Jay McKee in the first period with a fractured bone in his right hand.
Power play wakes up
The Canucks took 39 shots on Sanford, who stopped the first 26 he faced in his second start of the season. Vancouver outshot St. Louis 39-19 overall and 6-3 in the overtime.
"The difference in the game was Sanford," Canucks assistant coach Rick Bowness said. "As far as we're concerned, it shouldn't have gotten to OT."
Each team had two power-play goals, though the Canucks struggled for most of the game with an extra man. They failed on seven chances through the first two periods before Taylor Pyatt notched his third goal of the season about nine minutes into the third and then Naslund scored the tying goal.
St. Louis, which had nine power-play opportunities against the Canucks, came into the game ranked 22nd with a man advantage, scoring four goals in 32 attempts in its first six games.
Petr Cajanek scored his first goal of the season eight seconds into the Blues' first power play and Lee Stempniak added his third of the season 5:41 into the third period.
