The frustration in the Utah Hockey Club locker room is rising.

Utah is now on a five-game losing streak after Sunday night’s 2-1 setback to the St. Louis Blues, with the last three losses coming at home.

Nothing Utah HC doing seems to be working, and the players are starting to recognize it.

“We’ve had a lot of meetings about this,” said veteran defenseman Ian Cole after the game. “I think that everyone’s really said just about all that could be said. At some point, it needs to get put in practice on the ice.”

Head coach André Tourigny agreed.

“You want to win,” he said after the game. “You want to find a way to cross the finish line and stuff like that. I don’t think we played that well today.”

The team is left looking for answers to more questions than just what it should be called next season. They have one game left in their current home stand, and its importance is not lost on Tourigny.

“It’s an extremely huge game for us (Tuesday) against Philly,” he said. “We need the two points; We need to finish the home stand at least at .500, hit the road and have a hell of a road trip before the break. There’s no doubt about it.”

Here’s a rundown of Sunday’s game.

Utah Hockey for dummies

As mentioned in the pregame article, a number of Utah players have had great success in against the Blues in their respective careers.

Defenseman Michael Kesselring continued his offensive streak against St. Louis with Utah’s only goal of the game. He now has goals in all three games against the Blues this season and he has points in all four games he’s ever played against them.

“(I’m) a little lucky, I guess,” Kesselring said of his scoring tendency against the Blues. “It was nice to get one there.”

On the other hand, two point streaks came to an end. Nick Schmaltz had scored points in each of his previous 11 games against the Blues, while St. Louis-area native Clayton Keller had done so in each of his previous eight contests versus his hometown team.

It was not for a lack of effort. Keller and Schmaltz, who play on the same line, seemed to be feeding off each other all night. They were responsible for more than their fair share of Utah’s scoring chances, but they just couldn’t get anything past Blues goaltender Jordan Binnington.

It culminated in Keller’s third-period bomb on the power play. Upon receiving a perfect pass from Mikhail Sergachev, Keller let it fly and drilled the crossbar.

The puck went so high that the fans on the left side of the net thought it might fly above the netting and into their section of the stands.

Utah Hockey for casual fans

Since Connor Ingram’s return to the lineup, he has given his team a chance to win every time he’s tended the net. Utah has struggled to score though, which means he’s gotten credit for a few more losses than he’s deserved.

In his six games since returning, he has a .910 save percentage and a 2.50 goals-against average. He’s not the most technically sound goaltender, but he’s finds ways to make saves — and that’s what ultimately matters.

For example, nearing the halfway mark of the first period Sunday with Utah killing a penalty, Ingram made an excellent save in tight on Oskar Sundqvist.

Ingram was down and out, but he managed to get his stick in position to block Sundqvist’s next bid and keep the game knotted at zero. Ingram has given his team all the support in the world. The team needs to start returning the favor by scoring enough goals to win.

Utah Hockey for nerds

To the Blues’ credit, Utah HC’s biggest problem was something the Blues did well rather than something UHC did poorly: congest the offensive zone.

In the first two periods especially, Utah couldn’t get anything to the inner slot without five white sweaters blocking every lane. That forced them to either shoot from the outside or cough the puck up.

“We made some tactical adjustments after the second to build more speed through the neutral zone,” Tourigny said after the game. “We’re happy about the result and it’s something we’ll try to duplicate.”

According to Natural Stat Trick’s data, Utah controlled just 23.08% of the high-danger scoring chances in the first period and 33.33% of those chances in the second.

Statistically speaking, Tourigny’s adjustments worked in the third period: Utah HC had 83.33% of the high-danger chances in the third period.

What’s next?

Utah closes out its home stand on Tuesday as it hosts the Philadelphia Flyers.

The Flyers are in second-to-last place in the Eastern Conference standings, but there’s so much parity in the east that they’re only seven points out of the playoffs.

They made a big trade last week to acquire Jakob Pelletier and Andrei Kuzmenko, the latter of whom is due for a bounce-back season. He scored 39 goals and 74 points as a member of the Vancouver Canucks in 2022-23, but he hasn’t come close to that since.

Neither player has suited up for the Flyers yet. It’s unclear why Pelletier hasn’t played, but Kuzmenko is experiencing visa issues, according to NBC Sports Philadelphia’s Jordan Hall.

Being the last game of the home stand, it’s the last day to vote on the team name and branding.