{"id":400450,"date":"2026-01-10T12:03:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T12:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/400450\/"},"modified":"2026-01-10T12:03:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T12:03:07","slug":"schmaltz-has-3-points-mammoth-top-blues-for-3rd-straight-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/400450\/","title":{"rendered":"Schmaltz has 3 points, Mammoth top Blues for 3rd straight win"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Vejmelka became the second Czech native to be the NHL\u2019s first goaltender to reach the 20-win mark in a season, joining <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nhl.com\/player\/dominik-hasek-8447687\" title=\"Dominik Hasek\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Dominik Hasek<\/a> (1996-97 and 1998-99).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s a big accomplishment,\u201d said Vejmelka. \u201c[Hasek] is one of the best goalies in NHL history, so it&#8217;s an honor, and I&#8217;m glad about it, and happy for it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nhl.com\/player\/pavel-buchnevich-8477402\" title=\"Pavel Buchnevich\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Pavel Buchnevich<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nhl.com\/player\/oskar-sundqvist-8476897\" title=\"Oskar Sundqvist\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Oskar Sundqvist<\/a> scored and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nhl.com\/player\/joel-hofer-8480981\" title=\"Joel Hofer\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Joel Hofer<\/a> made 19 saves for the Blues (17-20-8), who lost their second straight game.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI thought we had a lot of really good looks,\u201d Blues coach Jim Montgomery said. \u201cWe need to bear down on those chances more. That&#8217;s kind of where the game slipped away from us. And special teams again, we ended up on the wrong side of it. Those two things combined right now didn&#8217;t allow us to have success.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Schmaltz opened the scoring at 15:10 of the first period, tapping a rebound from Keller into the net to give the Mammoth a 1-0 lead.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe&#8217;ve talked about it the last little bit here about maintaining pressure when we&#8217;re up,\u201d said Schmaltz. \u201cI thought earlier in the year we gave up some leads and kind of sat back and watched teams kind of dictate the play, and I thought tonight was another big win. We kind of shut it down and scored a big goal, and it mattered. So it shows a lot about this group and we&#8217;ve got to keep it going.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Crouse scored at 7:45 of the second period, beating Hofer with a wrist shot on the glove side off a pass from Keller to make it 2-0.<\/p>\n<p>Sundqvist made it 2-1 at 7:55, firing a wrist shot past the blocker of Vejmelka.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think we played pretty good, we can&#8217;t really get the puck in tonight,\u201d said Sundqvist. \u201cThe goalie was playing great and we had a couple of chances where we should probably score, myself included, but it is what it is sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Durzi scored at 11:43, beating Hofer on the back door off a pass from Schmaltz to give the Mammoth a 3-1 lead.<\/p>\n<p>Buchnevich scored at 16:27, sending a shot past the glove of Vejmelka to cut the lead to 3-2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vejmelka became the second Czech native to be the NHL\u2019s first goaltender to reach the 20-win mark in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400451,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-400450","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}