from Tom Timmermann of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,

“All over the ice it seemed it was real sloppy, a lot of turnovers, myself included,” Ott said. “You chase the game when you turn over the puck as much as we were doing tonight. It seemed like we couldn’t get anything going.” Asked if that was the result of the Blues’ play or the Panthers’, Ott said: “I’d say us.”

Hitchcock agreed. “To me, everything is work based,” he said. “When you play with a work base, you play in straight lines. You don’t play cute. You get on the grind, you wear teams down. That’s how we’re built. We didn’t want to play that way today. We didn’t give Florida near the respect they deserved. We wanted to play a slow, east-west game and we couldn’t. … It’s disappointing. But the next two days give us a chance to really work and get on the grind and that’s what we’ll do. Hopefully we’ll get our game back in order for the weekend.”

“Kind of a sloppy game, especially through neutral zone,” said defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk, who had his eight-game point streak snapped. “They played a pretty passive system and did a good job of clogging things up. That’s where we really looked out of sorts. It didn’t give us a chance to get our speed going into the zone and establish a forecheck. Everything else was just a little off tonight.”

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