St. Louis Blues, Chicago Blackhawks Will Look Very Different in Rematch of 2016 Playoff Matchup
As the St. Louis Blues and Chicago Blackhawks face off in a rematch of their first-round playoff series earlier this year, both teams will look significantly different.
The St. Louis Blues visit the United Center on Wednesday night to begin the 2016-17 regular season against the archrival Chicago Blackhawks. It will be a rematch of a heated seven-game first-round playoff series this past spring that ended the Blackhawks’ season and helped vault the Blues to the Western Conference Finals for the first time since the 2000-01 season.
In this matchup, though, many of the faces will be different from the ones that we saw back in April. Captain David Backes, who had two goals and two assists during that series, signed with Boston as a free agent. Forward Troy Brouwer, who scored an ultra-important game-winner in Game 7, has departed for Calgary, and he’s joined by goalie Brian Elliott, who shut out the ‘Hawks in Game 1 and stopped 31 of 33 Blackhawks shots in Game 7. Gritty winger Steve Ott, who injected some much-needed physicality into that series, also departed and signed with Detroit.
On the Blackhawks’ side, a trio of late-season trade acquisitions who saw action during that series–Andrew Ladd, Tomas Fleischmann, and Dale Weise–were not retained, while two key young forwards, Andrew Shaw and Teuvo Teravainen, were traded to help conserve cap space for the team’s three core scorers–Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, and Artemi Panarin. A host of defensemen who saw action during that series–Erik Gustafsson, David Rundblad, and Viktor Svedberg–are no longer are on the roster, while Niklas Hjalmarsson is suspended for the opener.
Each team will also begin the season with a player who contributed to that series on injured reserve. Jaden Schwartz has an elbow injury and won’t suit up for the Blues, while Chicago’s Andrew Desjardins is out with a lower-body injury.
The two teams will utilize different strategies to make up for the losses; the Blackhawks will open the season with five players 22 years of age or younger on their active roster, while the Blues will give more thorough looks to a few long-standing depth players (Dmitrij Jaskin, Magnus Paajarvi, Ty Rattie) while also plugging in free-agent signee David Perron and trade acquisition Nail Yakupov.
While the Blues’ lineup might seem inferior to one that includes Kane, Toews, and Panarin, you may find comfort in remembering that a patchwork Blues lineup rallied on November 4 of last year for arguably the biggest win of the regular season. In the game that will forever be remembered as the “Roar Bacon” game (for reasons that you can read about here), the Blues rallied from a 5-2 deficit to defeat the Hawks 6-5 in overtime.
The Blues played without Schwartz in that game, and it was also the game where Jake Allen really cemented himself as the starting goaltender (until he went down with a knee injury in early January, that is), coming in to relieve Elliott in the second period and stopping 27 of 28 shots.
It’s actually quite likely that the Blues’ lineup Wednesday will be more potent than the one from the “Roar Bacon” win; while Rattie, Paajarvi, Scott Gomez, and Chris Butler suited up for that game with Schwartz, Paul Stastny, Patrik Berglund, and Kevin Shattenkirk sidelined, the Blues now have Stastny, Berglund, and Shattenkirk healthy and have basically swapped in Perron and Yakupov for Backes and Brouwer.
Wednesday’s game should be a fun preview of what’s to come in a highly-competitive Central Division during 2016-17. To find out more about what to expect from the Blackhawks, we caught up with a Blackhawks expert: