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The Blues continued their winning ways at home on Thursday, besting the Canucks 4-1. The Blues benefited from a close if not questionable offsides challenge, allowing the goal to stand. After getting down a goal, the Blues scored four unanswered goals, getting two from Magnus Paajarvi, one from Kyle Brodziak on a great play by Alex Pietrangelo, and an empty net goal by Pietrangelo.
His two goals gave Paajarvi 3 goals in his last two games and six points in his last seven games, doing it all in under 14 minutes a game. In addition to Paajarvi, Scottie Upshall has been playing extremely well lately. In addition to scoring two goals in his last four games, Upshall has been averaging around 14 minutes a game. Before March 11, Upshall had only played 14 minutes in two games all season.
Of course, Jake Allen also had another strong game, stopping 27 of 28 shots, bringing his March save percentage to 95.7%. Pretty good considering he is following up a strong February that had him post a 93.3%. It’s no surprise the Blues are winning a lot more than December and January when he posted 89.2% and 84.1% save percentages respectively. How much of that improvement is due to Martin Brodeur’s coaching? From my relatively untrained eye, Allen is playing a different style of game, something some of us have been harping on for quite a while. He is getting out more, cutting down the angle rather than staying so deep in net while also moving less and staying more square to shooters.
Tonight, the Blues will host Brian Elliott and the Calgary Flames. The Flames are winless in their first two games of their three game road trip. The Flames had been on a roll before this read trip, winning 12 of the previous 13. Of course, almost 2/3rds of those games were on home ice and in the last few years, the Flames have been very strong at home.
The Flames are currently in a wild card spot but are within 5 points of the division leaders. They could finish anywhere from 1st in the division to perhaps even out of the playoffs though likely their worst finish would be the 2nd wild card spot.
The Flames are in the middle third of the league in goals per game, goals against per game, power play, penalty kill, shots for and shots against. Their goal differential is only .02 goals per game.
They are led by Johnny Gaudreau who has 54 points in 64 games. Sean Monahan and Mikael Backlund both have surpassed the 20 goal mark. Dougie Hamilton is having another strong season putting up 48 points in 73 games from the blue line. Brian Elliott has pushed his save percentage up to 91.1%.
Matthew Tkachuk will be back from his suspension tonight.
Given the Blues winning ways recently, I don’t expect coach Mike Yeo will change the lines. I expect the lines to look like this:
Schwartz – Steen – Tarasenko
Sanford – Berglund - Perron
Paajarvi – Barbashev – Yakupov
Upshall – Brodziak – Reaves
Bouwmeester – Pietrangelo
Edmundson - Parayko
Gunnarsson – Bortuzzo
Allen
It’s a great day for hockey.
Fellow Hockeybuzz bloggers
Nashville Predator's Paul McCann,
Winnipeg Jet's Peter Tessier and
Minnesota Wild's Dan Wallace have generously agreed to a friendly charity wager. We were hoping to do the whole division but don't have it fully represented yet. The blogger whose team finishes the highest the standings at the end of the year gets to pick a charity to whom the others donate in their name.
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