By Annie Ross
Robby Fabbri clutched the three pucks in his hand after his first NHL hat trick helped the St. Louis Blues defeat the Flyers 6-3 at Scottrade Center last night.
The Blues (19-12-5) trailed 3-2 after Flyers forward Brayden Schenn scored a power-play goal at 4:13 of the third period, but they responded with four straight goals.
David Perron and Scottie Upshall (above) started the run when they scored 1:20 apart. Perron tied it 3-3 with a deflection at 5:53, and Upshall put St. Louis ahead 4-3 with a deflection of his own at 7:13.
Fabbri scored his second of the game with 4:59 remaining to put the Blues up 5-3, and then completed his hat trick with an empty-net goal with 2:56 remaining to make it 6-3.
St. Louis scored three third-period goals in its previous nine games.
Kevin Shattenkirk also scored for the Blues, who are 14-2-4 at home, including 12-1-4 in the past 17 games.
“I think we’ve had a lot of these go our way at home,” St. Louis coach Ken Hitchcock said. “We just stay on it. We trust our work at home and believe in it and just stay on it.”
Backup goalie Carter Hutton made 17 saves for his first win since Nov. 5.
Wayne Simmonds and Schenn each had a goal and an assist, Nick Cousins scored, and Travis Konecny had two assists for the Flyers (20-13-4). Steve Mason made 19 saves.
It was the Flyers’ fourth loss in five games (1-3-1) after a 10-game winning streak.
“We wanted just too easy of a night,” Flyers coach Dave Hakstol said. “We wanted to play too easy of a game. We have to be better and we’ll address that, and we’re not going into easy places to play the rest of this road trip, so we’ll sort it out and get back to work tomorrow, and that’s the bottom line.”
Simmonds scored his Flyers-leading 17th goal to give Philly a 1-0 lead 3:25 into the game, but St. Louis got two power-play goals, from Shattenkirk at 15:01 and Fabbri with 11.7 seconds remaining in the first, to take a 2-1 lead.
The Flyers scored the only goal in the second period when Cousins deflected Ivan Provorov’s wrist shot from the left point. After Cousins tipped it in the slot, the puck caromed off Blues defenseman Carl Gunnarsson and got past Hutton at 4:32 to tie it 2-2.
