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Work isn't letting me put together a blog but I at least wanted to update the blog for tonight's expected lineup:
Forwards
Scottie Upshall- Brayden Schenn - Vladimir Tarasenko
Vladimir Sobotka - Paul Stastny - Tage Thompson
Patrik Berglund - Kyle Brodziak - Alexander Steen
Dmitrij Jaskin - Ivan Barbashev - Magnus Paajarvi
Defensemen
Jay Bouwmeester - Alex Pietrangelo
Joel Edmundson - Colton Parayko
Carl Gunnarsson - Robert Bortuzzo
Netminder
Carter Hutton
Anyone else wonder if there was more to the concussion spotter/injury issue with Jake Allen against Dallas?
Ville Husso won the AHL Player of the Week last week. Hopefully he will start stringing together more consistent starts. He has been the Allen mini-me with 5 games under 85.5% save percentage and 5 games over 94% with none in between (minimum 22 minutes).
***PRIOR***
The Blues past two games have been a roller coaster of a ride. On Friday, they rallied in the 3rd period from a 1 goal deficit to take a 2-1 lead 5 minutes into the 3rd period only to blow the lead with less than 5 minutes left. Blues fans hope that the 2nd goal was a preview of many goals to come from Tage Thompson. Thompson proved yet again that he has the raw tools to be an NHL player, even if he may not quite be as polished as you would like yet. Of course the rally, doesn’t really matter in the end with the loss.
On Saturday, the Blues blew a 2nd period, 2 goal lead only to best the Hurricanes on a Scottie Upshall goal midway through the 3rd period.
In looking back at Friday’s game, the third period started oddly with Jake Allen getting forced to leave the game after Colton Parayko was pushed into him. Paryako made direct contact with Allen’s head and Allen seemed to take some time getting back to his feet. As a result, the NHL concussion spotter rightfully forced the team to pull Allen from the game. Carter Hutton came into the game and the Blues followed his entry with 2 goals, taking a 2-1 lead. Hutton played approximately nine and a half minutes, playing well and making a brilliant toe save before coach Mike Yeo made a curious decision to put Allen back into the game.
This wasn’t a case of Allen only missing a minute or two. He missed nine and a half minutes of game clock, substantially more actual time had passed though. Was this just a case of the full concussion protocol? Was there more to it than that? Regardless, he had a lot of time to get cold and had gone through a bit of a process. It was long enough that I would have let Hutton finish the game. Shut him down and decide later who would start Saturday night.
Less than 5 minutes after returning, Allen went to play the puck behind the net. Alex Pientrangelo and Paul Stastny have poor spacing, allowing Tyler Seguin to effectively eliminate them as an option. Joel Edmundson hustles to the corner and calls for the puck. Allen hasn’t surveyed the full surroundings and throws a suicide pass to Edmundson. Instead of Jamie Benn blowing up Edmundons, he rightfully decides to take the puck instead. Stastny then goes to cover Seguin and clips Allen. Pietrangelo makes a poor play, getting caught watching and gliding to space in front of the net rather than challenging Benn with the puck behind the net, allowing Benn to come out and hit the mostly open net. Watch it
here.
Less than two and a half minutes later, Joel Edmundson takes an ill-advised penalty. Blues fans may not like the call, especially given all of the other stuff that was let go all game long but Edmundson cannot make that play at that point in the game. He cannot grab Benn in the head and neck area and rake his helmet off. It’s a poor play that should serve as a learning point. You can’t risk getting that call at that point of the game.
On the ensuing power play, Allen illustrates an ongoing issue in his game, his difficulty in trying to see through traffic and more importantly, how he takes himself out of position in trying to do so. On the play, Allen should know that he needs to look to the short side because Pietrangelo and others should always be protecting the middle. He moves to his right and looks to his right, leaning to the middle and getting beat by Alexander Radulov on the short side as Pietrangelo goes down to block any shot to the middle of the net. See it here:
Capping off a poor five minutes by Pietrangelo, including being on the ice for all 3 Stars goals, he gets out-hustled down the ice by Radulov for an empty net goal. As the Stars flip the puck out of the zone, Pietrangelo is already outside of the zone by the face-off dot while Radulov is still inside the zone, between the blue line and the high side of the face-off circle, yet Radulov beats him down the ice by two strides for the empty net goal. Maybe if Pietrangelo didn’t play almost 27 and a half minutes while Colton Parayko played not even 19 and a half minutes, Pietrangelo would have had more legs on the play. Pietrangelo played almost 3 minutes of the last 5 minutes. Parayko only played 1:45 in that same span.
For his part, coach Yeo admitted putting Allen back in was a mistake, saying that he “put Jake and the team in a bad position there” and that it was “a bad decision by me”. I wish someone in the scrum would have asked him about the allocation of minutes on defense.
In Saturday’s game, the Blues lost their two goal lead on a great play by Vince Dunn that went very wrong when Vladimir Sobotka missed the redirection.
When Sobotka misses the pass, the puck rims around and out of the zone to Derek Ryan who scores on the breakaway with a simple cut across move. Carter Hutton and Alex Pietrangelo defend the cut across poorly, resulting in the goal. Watch it
here.
The Hurricanes second goal start as a harmless play with the Hurricanes coming in on a 3 on 4. After Edmundson falls down, it turns into a 4 on 2 around the net.
Tage Thompson shows his inexperience on the play as he was the 4th Blues player in the zone, making it the 3 on 4 but gets caught making a poor pressure at the point which allowed the 4 on 2 to develop. Watch it
here.
Of course all’s well that ends well, as Scottie Upshall scored midway through the 3rd period and creating a 3-2 win for the Blues. Speaking of ending well, the Blues can’t be too unhappy with 50 points in 41 games, 7th most in the league and 10th best in point percentage after losing Robby Fabbri, Jaden Schwartz and jay Bouwmeester for significant time and sitting in the top 3 overall in man-games lost to injury.
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 will donate in their name.
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