51ºÚÁÏ

One team wasn't going to be desperate enough — and it was the Blues.

In a matchup of two of the five worst teams in the NHL, the Maple Leafs beat the Blues 3-2 in overtime Tuesday night in Toronto. William Nylander scored the game-winning goal with 53.9 seconds remaining in overtime.

Read the full transcript of our weekly Blues chat. An easy-to-read transcript is below the chat box.

Matthew DeFranks: Hello. Sorry for the late start. I had an appointment run long. Let's get to questions.

The Blues lost again Tuesday, this time in overtime at Toronto. There were signs of progress, head coach Jim Montgomery says, but the loss dropped 51ºÚÁÏ to 6-9-5 and the team badly needs wins.

Here's what Montgomery as well as Cam Fowler and Dalibor Dvorsky had to say after the game about what they saw Tuesday.

For Justin Faulk, Tuesday was about sharing the day with his teammates.

Before he arrived in 51ºÚÁÏ in 2019, Faulk never had the chance to celebrate a teammate’s 1,000th game. His first eight years in Carolina featured some of the youngest teams in the league, so his first chance to be part of a 1,000th game was Alexander Steen’s in February 2020. There’s been plenty of them for Faulk to be a part of in 51ºÚÁÏ recently, with Nick Leddy in March 2024, Cam Fowler in December 2024 (at the Winter Classic) and Brayden Schenn in February — not to mention Ryan Suter’s 1,500th game also in February.

By the end of Blues practice Monday, there was the metronomic beat of sticks hitting the ice, followed quickly by an uproar and mob in the corner of the rink. Let the team bonding begin.

The Blues left 51ºÚÁÏ for a five-game, 11-day road trip — the longest trip they have this season — and they did it with the hope that time in Toronto, Philadelphia and New York can galvanize their unit and lead to success in the standings.

It was almost an admission of guilt, a confession of sins or an acceptance of a sentence. The fans inside Enterprise Center felt the passive embarrassment of Cam Fowler’s pass back to his goalie, the sheepish shame in pleading for a whistle, the humiliation of a toothless attack that went almost a period without spraying a shot on goal.

In an eventual 4-1 loss to the Golden Knights on Saturday night, the fans let the Blues know what the standings already told them: This hockey is intolerable.

The result would be alarming if it weren’t so recurring, so familiar for this season’s Blues.

In Friday night’s 6-5 shootout loss to the Flyers, the Blues invented a new way to lose this season, by blowing a pair of two-goal leads to Philadelphia, reverting to their earlier days of porous defense and inconsistent pushes.