Kariya leads Blues to rare home win

Paul Kariya gave fans of the St. Louis Blues a reason to go home smiling on Tuesday night.

Kariya scored twice for his first goals at home in more than 15 months and the Blues recovered after blowing a two-goal lead in a 4-3 shootout win against the Detroit Red Wings at the Scottrade Center.

St. Louis is a League-worst 10-16-5 at home and has blown a lead in the third period eight times this season.

"Get the win first, but it was nice to get that monkey off my back at home," Kariya said. "I don't know what happened there, but it's behind us. Hopefully, they start flooding now."

T.J. Oshie and Brad Boyes scored in the shootout for St. Louis, while goalie Chris Mason clinched it with a left pad save on Henrik Zetterberg in the third round. Jason Williams scored in the shootout for Detroit.

"They have a tough crew of shooters, but our guys did a great job of scoring and taking the pressure off," Mason said. "I made a big save and that was the end of it."
 
Kariya redirected David Perron's shot for the Blues' first goal and added an assist for his second two-goal game of the season and sixth multipoint contest. Andy McDonald also scored in regulation for the Blues, who suffered a 5-2 loss at Colorado on Monday.

"Maybe we need to get less sleep the night before games, but we certainly had good energy and carried it in," Kariya said. "They certainly got some lucky goals and lucky bounces.

"It was a disappointing they got a point out of there, but we'll take the two points, obviously."

The Red Wings rallied from a 3-1 deficit in the final 5:34 on goals by Pavel Datsyuk and Valtteri Filppula. Johan Franzen, who missed 55 games with a torn ACL, had an assist in his return. He received 17:28 of ice time and had four shots on goal. Kris Draper also scored for Detroit, which received a 42-save performance from Jimmy Howard.

"It felt like the last game I played," Franzen said. "I thought it was going to be worse. Better than I thought it was going to be."
 
Datsyuk deflected the puck off his skate to cut the gap to 3-2 with 5:34 to go before Filppula capitalized on a bad clear by Keith Tkachuk to tie it with 2:20 remaining, scoring from a scrum in front of the net.

The Red Wings (27-21-11) have lost three in a row.

"We showed a lot of fight coming back," Wings captain Nicklas Lidstrom said. "We played as a desperate team, we were the ones getting the pucks to the net and crashing the net and getting rewarded, too."

Material from wire services was used in this report.