The goalies were perfect through the first three rounds of the shootout, sending it to a sudden-death fourth round where Ryan Johansen scored and Pekka Rinne stopped Ryan Donato to give the Nashville Predators a huge 5-4 victory.

“It hurt pretty bad, like a punch. I don’t usually go down from those. But I knew I had to go back (to the room), because something was wrong. I noticed I had a little bit of blood. When I opened my eyes, I saw the trainer was coming, so I knew something was wrong. Originally, I thought I was going to go down, get up, shake it off and finish the power play.”

Since Binnington took over the Blues net, no team in the NHL has picked up more points than their 40. Moreover, their point percentage of 0.741 ranks third in the league during this span. The Blues have also gotten the fifth-best goaltending in the NHL since Binnington took over.

With Radulov’s fiery personality comes him losing his temper very quickly. That frustration has manifested into a second among the team 46 penalty minutes and can be spotted when he refuses to vacate the ice on a proper shift time and remains stubbornly in the play; he holds the longest shift times among forwards on the team, averaging 47 seconds per shift. Surely it also has something to do with when Radulov abandons the perceived plan and ad-libs more than most would like to see. For a productive player, that’s sometimes the Jekyll & Hyde actions teams have to leverage a high-stakes balancing act with.

“We had some tremendous energy today and we pressured them all night long,” Minnesota coach Bruce Boudreau said. “When you pressure any team, it’s tough to make plays. We were forechecking, we stripped pucks and I thought it was (Dubnyk’s) best game of the year.”

The Anaheim Ducks have been getting a lot of attention recently for how their season has imploded and how that led to the firing of coach Randy Carlyle over the weekend. But it’s worth pointing out that since Dec. 1, no NHL team has fewer wins than Colorado’s seven.