IN DEEP TROUBLE
Blues’ depth hurts Hawks
Should we be surprised the St. Louis Blues have the Chicago Blackhawks by the throat as they try to squeeze the life out of them, up 3-1 in their first-round playoff series? Yes.
Should we be surprised with how they’re going about it? No.
The Blues, their noses always pushed against the glass as they see other teams hoisting the Stanley Cup, look like a very deep team, with its confidence growing by the minute.
The Blackhawks, with three Cup victories in the last six years, look like a constellation of stars with a twinkling of support from the rest of their cast — in large part because they’ve been stripped bare by the salary cap.
The Blues are used to losing; the Blackhawks not so much.
Chicago faces elimination in Game 5 on Thursday night in St. Louis, and the wheel may finally be turning in this draining series where every game has been a onegoal result, just desperation hockey from shift to shift.
“I’ve been here five years,” Blues coach Ken Hitchcock said. “The (first-round) Minnesota series (in 2015) was strange because we ran into a team that was on top of their game and they had a goalie who was lights out. They were a hot team. I throw that out, (but prior to that) we lost to Cup champions. We weren’t good enough.
“We gave everything we had. I’ve never seen a team pour everything into that series we had in L.A. (in 2012 and 2013), and that series against Chicago (in 2014). We just weren’t good enough. They were a little bit deeper, they were a little bit stronger, they had a little bit more in their game than we did. It showed.
The Blackhawks seem fractured. They won’t go quietly into the night but can they rally from 3-1 down, as they did to the Vancouver Canucks in 2011, getting it to OT in Game 7, before losing on Alex Burrows’ goal?
“When you’re down 3-1 in a series, I think the pressure shifts and everybody wants to win in the worst way. That’s why we’ve got to come with that attitude and appetite (Thursday) night. But I don’t think it’s any different than it’s been in other years,” said Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville.
The Blues had Chicago down 2-0 in the first round in 2014 before losing four straight games, and captain David Backes, who has witnessed far too many disappointments in his 10 years in St. Louis, admits they suffered from swelled heads.
“I think we’ve smartened up. We’d fall into those traps in previous years where we thought we’d accomplished something before we’d accomplished anything,” Backes said.
“We’ve had to reflect so often on what went wrong.”
Do the Blackhawks have enough horses to get back in it?
This is a team with six players — Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Corey Crawford, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook and Marian Hossa — eating up 60 per cent of the salary cap and Hossa, long one of the game’s ultimate two-way power forwards, at 37 looks like a shadow of the great player he used to be with the puck on his stick.
Stan Bowman is a terrific general manager, but he’s had to fill out his roster with stocking stuffer forwards — Richard Panik, Tomas Fleischman, Dale Weise — and he’s trying to get by with a glacial-skating D-man Michal Rozsival and neophytes like Viktor Svedberg or Eric Gustafsson in his third pairing.
The Blues do not have star power, save for winger Vladimir Tarasenko, who can score seemingly at will, and defenceman Alex Pietrangelo.
They are four lines deep and have six solid defencemen. Even after losing Carl Gunnarsson to an upper-body injury, they just plug in Robert Bortuzzo. Their No. 5 defenceman, Colton Parayko, is a rookie but seamlessly moves into the second pair with Kevin Shattenkirk.
The Blackhawks do not have a third line anywhere near as dangerous as Patrik Berglund, David Backes and Robby Fabbri.
Only the irritant Andrew Shaw, who has handed a one-game suspension for a homophobic slur at the referees over a late penalty call in Game 4, has given Chicago any secondary scoring with four points.
And now he’s out for Game 5.