Blues face desperate Oilers as both jockey for postseason

After winning 15 of 19 games to move into playoff position, the St. Louis Blues can't relax just yet.

With a 4-3 shootout loss Sunday in Buffalo, the Blues dropped to 1-2-2 in their past five games since their big run and have just a two-point lead on the Dallas Stars for third place in the Central Division. The Blues are five points above the current cutoff line for a Western Conference playoff berth.

The Blues play host to the Edmonton Oilers on Tuesday night.

"Not doing the right things, not taking care of the puck, maybe thinking it would be an easier game than it is," Blues forward Brayden Schenn told NHL.com. "There's a lot of good teams in this league, and you can't take any team lightly. It's nice to get a point out of that, but if we play the right way, we should be able to beat this team at this time of year.

"If we play our way for 60 minutes, play the right way, grind teams down like we do, we're not fun to play against. When we don't do it for 60 minutes, we give teams a better chance to beat us."

The Blues (37-27-8) did rally from a two-goal deficit in Buffalo, with David Perron pulling them within a goal to extend his points streak to 15 games before Schenn tied it at 8:41 of the third period.

"It was one of those games. It wasn't very clean all game," Blues coach Craig Berube said. "It was a tough grind out there. We didn't execute very well. Give them credit, they played hard. We just didn't execute very well and our puck play wasn't very good, we turned a lot of pucks over and they had the puck more than us."

The Oilers (32-33-7), led by former St. Louis coach Ken Hitchcock, are coming off a 6-3 loss Sunday in Las Vegas that left them seven points back in the race for the conference's second and final wild-card playoff berth.

The Oilers trailed 3-2 entering the third period before the Golden Knights pulled away.

"I thought in the third period they skated us into the ground a little bit and took advantage," Hitchcock said. "We looked tired in the third period and they amped it up to another level.

"We were right there after two (periods) but their skating legs forced us into a lot of puck errors."

Edmonton's Connor McDavid had two assists to become the first NHL player with eight straight multipoint games since Tampa Bay's Vincent Lecavalier in 2007. McDavid is three points shy of his career high (108) set last season.

Yet that still wasn't enough for the Oilers, who dropped to 2-3-0 in their past five games.

"It's a learning experience where you've got to keep pushing through; keep finding ways to get through their speed by chipping pucks and skating onto it, and forechecking the puck back," Oilers forward Sam Gagner told CHED radio. "And I thought we did a really good job of that for certain parts of that game, and we got rewarded for it, but just not enough of it."

--Field Level Media