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Jovanovski scores twice, Nagy comes through in shootout

Jan 16, 2007 - 1:23 AM GLENDALE, Arizona (Ticker) -- Ed Jovanovski and Ladislav Nagy sent the Phoenix Coyotes on the road howling.

Jovanovski scored twice and Nagy tallied the deciding goal in the fourth round of the shootout to lift the Coyotes to a 5-4 victory over the St. Louis Blues.

After a surprising seven-game winning streak that featured the final six victories on the road, the Coyotes returned home and were outscored by a lopsided 9-2 in losses to Detroit and San Jose.

Getting ready for a four-game road swing that starts Wednesday against Colorado, Phoenix got a lift from both Jovanovski and Nagy in beating St. Louis for the third time in as many tries this season.

"We know we didn't play our best coming off the road trip," Jovanovski said. "We knew we had to play better, and today we had that relentless attitude where we got up and got them on their heels."

Jovanovski scored his first goal on the power play with 50 seconds left in the second period, giving the Coyotes a 3-2 lead. The defenseman completed his first multi-goal game of the season with his 10th tally at 16:27 of the third period to snap a 3-3 tie.

However, Peter Sejna tallied for the first time this season with 1:45 left in regulation by beating goaltender Mikael Tellqvist through traffic to give the Blues a 4-4 tie.

After Tellqvist stopped Sejna in the fourth round of the shootout, Nagy won it by snapping a shot over the glove of netminder Manny Legace.

"I knew Legace was going to get down low," Nagy said. "I just tried to get it upstairs and I beat him (to) the high glove."

Yanic Perreault and Jeremy Roenick scored in the first period for Phoenix, which went 3-for-9 on the power play.

"A good power play can win you a lot of hockey games," Jovanovski said. "We understood we had to be better on the power play. The game plan was to establish the shots, not only on the power play. But if you get it on net, good things are going to happen."

Christian Backman, Radek Dvorak and Dennis Wideman all tallied for the Blues, who failed in a bid for their first four-game winning streak since March 2004.

"If we had a better start we could win this game," Backman said. "We came back here and talked about it. The last four minutes, we played like we wanted to." St. Louis coach Andy Murray pointed to a slow start, which saw his team fall into a 2-0 hole after one period.

"We've had trouble getting out of the gate lately," Murray said. "Ultimately we were playing catch up all day but you have to respect the battle in this team and the adversity we faced. I liked the battle in our team but we'd like to have it earlier."