Leafs achieve needed victory at St. Louis

ST. LOUIS — Toronto had lost five of its last six games and fell behind less than two minutes in against a tough team on the road. However, the Maple Leafs kept their focus and came back to get a needed win.

Nazem Kadri scored twice and Roman Polak had two assists against his former team to lead Toronto to a 4-1 victory over the St. Louis Blues on Saturday.

“We’re a relentless group,” Kadri said. “We’re starting to become better with adversity than we used to be. That’s a contending team right there, they’re a great team, one of the better teams in the league and we came in here and got a solid road win.”

Brad Boyes and P.A. Parenteau also scored for Toronto, and Garret Sparks stopped 27 shots for his second career victory.

“We didn’t have a good start but we battled back,” Polak said. “That’s what I like on our team right now, that we battle no matter what.”

Vladimir Tarasenko scored his 15th goal of the season for St. Louis, while Jake Allen made 25 saves.

The Blues, who lost at the New York Islanders in a shootout on Friday, fell to 4-5-3 over their past 12 games after starting the season 11-3-1.

“We played 15 minutes the right way and had all kinds of success and then refused to stay with it,” St. Louis coach Ken Hitchcock said. “We’re scoring one goal a game and we had a great start and that wasn’t good enough. We decided we wanted to play a different way and by the time we decided to catch it back up it was way too late.

“It’s not the right way to play, the players know it, especially the veteran players,” Hitchcock added. “I’m not sure what it’s going to take for us to get back to what we are capable of. That’s why we’re a .500 hockey club the last little while.”

The Blues looked strong early and had several scoring chances. Tarasenko gave the Blues a 1-0 lead just 1:51 into the game after a 2-on1 breakaway with Paul Stastny.

The Maple Leafs answered with a goal late in the first, two in the second and then another in the third. Kadri tied the score with 1:17 left in the first period, putting home a rebound of a shot from Leo Komarov for his fourth of the season.

Polak, who also assisted on Kadri’s goal, was originally credited with the next goal, on a topshelf slap shot at 6:11 of the second period after taking a pass from Shawn Matthias. But it was later changed to Boyes’ second of the season on a tip-in. It gave him a goal against every team in the NHL in his career.