Andrey SenchenkoSport correspondentAll materialsEmail to author The Minnesota Wild beat the St. Louis Blues to level the score in the NHL's first-round playoff series. The first star of the meeting was Kirill Kaprizov, who scored a historic hat-trick. The confrontation between the St. Louis Blues and the Minnesota Wild is rightly considered the main, most unpredictable and most interesting (for the Russian audience, for sure) in the NHL Western Conference playoffs. Both teams quite evenly and very powerfully went through the entire segment of the regular season and, maybe, did not make an application if they would win the Stanley Cup, but they gave guarantees to make a lot of noise in the playoffs. The Russians directly influenced this: Kirill Kaprizov broke a lot of club records » Minnesota» and entered the top five scorers of the league (108 points — the best result among Russian hockey players), and Vladimir Tarasenko, Pavel Buchnevich and Ivan Barbashev scored 218 points for three, and Tarasenko and Buchnevich are the main snipers and scorers «Blues». To some extent, it’s even a shame that both teams meet at such an early stage — it will be sad to say goodbye to one of these clubs already at the end of the first round. The very first game confirmed the forecast that the series would indeed be extremely interesting and spectacular, but at the same time surprised how easily the Blues dealt with the helpless, it seemed, the Wild. Especially «got» Kaprizov, who was hit by a wave of criticism from American fans and journalists. with Fiala and Kaprizov. One does not do his job, and Kaprizov didn’t exist at all for the entire third period and simply disappeared. The whole team turns into crap when Kaprizov and Fiala are neutralized. This team has no chance, «this was the position of the Americans in relation to Kaprizov .
