Blues’ depth hurting Hawks
With series at 3-1, Chicago seems fractured — but don’t write them off
ST. LOUIS — 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 dogfight? 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 with the Stanley Cup, look like a very deep, confidence-growing-by-the-minute team right now. The Hawks, with three Cups 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 Hawks the flip side.
But the wheel may finally be turning in this draining series where every game has been a one-goal result, just desperation hockey from shift to shift.
“I’ve been here five years,” Blues coach Ken Hitchcock began. “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 Hawks 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 seven, but 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 tomorrow night. But I don’t think it’s any different than it’s been in other years,” said Hawks coach Joel Quenneville.
The Blues had them down 2-0 and lost four straight in the first round in 2014, and captain David Backes, who has been there for 10 years and seen far too many disappointments, fully admits they got 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,” said Backes.
“We’ve had to reflect so often on what went wrong,” he said.
They seem smarter, more resilient now. Like a team that could go all the way.
Do the Hawks have enough horses to get back in it? This is a Hawks’ team with six players — Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Corey Crawford, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook and Marian Hossa — eating up 60 per cent of the cap and Hossa, long one of the game’s ultimate two-way power forwards, looks like a shadow of the great player he used to be with the puck on his stick at 37.
The Blues do not have the starpower, save for winger Vlady Tarasenko, who can score from anywhere, anytime, and star defenceman Alex Pietrangelo.
They are four lines deep, they are six D deep, even 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 Hawks do not have a third line anywhere near as dangerous as Patrik Berglund, David Backes and Robby Fabbri.