{"id":546772,"date":"2026-04-08T05:00:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T05:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/546772\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T05:00:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T05:00:18","slug":"avalanche-defeat-blues-clinch-western-conference-central-division-titles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/546772\/","title":{"rendered":"Avalanche defeat Blues, clinch Western Conference, Central Division titles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Thomas<\/a> scored for the Blues (33-32-12), who remain five points behind the Los Angeles Kings for the second wild card in the West with five games remaining. Joel Hofer<\/a>\u00a0made 34 saves for St. Louis, which was 3-0-1 in its previous four games, including a 3-2 win at Colorado on Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe expected to see a better version of the Avs and we did,\u201d St. Louis coach Jim Montgomery said. \u201cThe first period, they won all those battles. It was almost over 60 percent, and they were really committed to checking. Everybody thinks about their speed and their offense, but what\u2019s really impressive about their team is how committed they are to checking. They\u2019re No. 1 in goals-against by a lot. Goals-for they lead, but it\u2019s not by a lot. Tonight they came out and they were going to make sure they gave us nothing, and then we had to defend a lot and they threw a lot of pucks at the net early and then as the period wore on in the first, they started to find slot lines on us, which has been a real strength of ours. They exposed it because we had to defend so much, and then the second period was the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Avalanche outshot the Blues 17-2 in the first period, including 15 of the final 16, and led 2-0 when they scored twice in just over three minutes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been up and down here a little bit recently,\u201d Bednar said. \u201cI didn\u2019t love our game against (the Vancouver Canucks, an 8-6 loss last Thursday), loved our game against Dallas (Saturday, a 2-0 win against the Stars), our defensive game the other night against the Blues, tonight I really liked it. We\u2019ve proven that we can do it when we set our minds to it. \u2026 I don\u2019t have to see it for 60 minutes for every game the rest of the way, but we need to see it enough to secure our goal and making sure everyone\u2019s confident in the way we play.<\/p>\n

\u201cTonight, the way we played was great, and the win\u2019s even better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nichushkin made it 1-0 at 16:11 when he was in front of the net and tipped a Devon Toews<\/a> wrister from straight away near the blue line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert Thomas scored for the Blues (33-32-12), who remain five points behind the Los Angeles Kings for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[463,464],"tags":[5,4,60,14,104,718],"class_list":{"0":"post-546772","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl-playoffs","8":"category-stanley-cup-playoffs","9":"tag-hockey","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-nhl-playoffs","12":"tag-stanley-cup","13":"tag-stanley-cup-playoffs","14":"tag-stanley-cup-playoffs-nhl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116367328781253502","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}