http://www.stltoday.com/sports/hockey/p ... 0a65f.html
So essentially the plan for the 2017 Blues is to become the 2015 Minnesota Wild. Not sure how I feel about this, but it doesn't really instill me with a whole lot of confidence. Sounds like Hitch wants to be Yeo and Yeo wants to be Yeo with us.Jeremy Rutherford wrote:In the summer before his final season behind the Blues’ bench, Ken Hitchcock is changing nothing about his routine. He calls August “scheming and dreaming time for coaches,” so while he relaxes in Western Canada, his mind is starting to wander.
“You’re imagining line combinations, all types of stuff,” Hitchcock said.
Back in St. Louis, there is some fear among the Blues’ fans about how those combos will look given that David Backes and Troy Brouwer are gone. Their free-agent departures to Boston and Calgary, respectively, will subtract 356 career regular-season goals and 1,340 games. Also, without the 32-year-old Backes and 30-year-old Brouwer, the average age of the forwards drops to 26.7 years, and it’s even younger among the top nine (25.9).
Hitchcock admitted having some concern about growing playoff beards with peach fuzz this season. But while walking a golf course in Kelowna, British Columbia, it was a Blues’ rival of all people who helped convince the coach that his team should be fine.
“Out here is ‘Chicago country’ because quite a few Chicago players summer out here, and I ran into a couple of guys on the golf course,” Hitchcock said. “It was a short conversation, but one guy said something that really tweaked me. He said, ‘You guys are a veteran team.’ It never hit me until I started driving home, like that ah-ha moment, where I thought, ‘You know what, he’s right, we’re a young team, but we’re a young team only in age, not in experience.’”
The average age of the Blues’ entire roster, including defensemen and goaltenders, is 26.9 years, but the average number of NHL games per player is 354.6. Defenseman Jay Bouweester (990 games) and forwards Kyle Brodziak (697) and Scottie Upshall (623) raise that total, but core players such as Alex Pietrangelo (459), Vladimir Tarasenko (259) and Jaden Schwartz (240) cannot be classified as newbies.
“We’ve got experienced players who are just hitting their prime now,” Hitchcock said. “We have a lot of guys that started young and we’ve grown them into the group. We are a veteran team that has a chance to get even better because they’re just starting to reach maturity.”
Hitchcock has been scheming and dreaming about the possibilities. He foresees a couple of significant issues with the loss of Backes and Brouwer but found some positives in the flexibility he’ll have with his forwards. He also believes that while the Blues will be forced to play a different style with a smaller lineup, the arrival of ‘coach in waiting’ Mike Yeo and fellow assistant Rick Wilson is well-timed because of the success they had with an undersized group in Minnesota.
First, the potential problems.
“Backes and Brouwer played a lot of minutes at the end of games, and we’re going to have to find out in exhibition games who can do those things,” Hitchcock said. “And how are we going to structure our power play to make it just as effective as it’s been the last four years? We’ll probably have to adopt a little bit of strategies from a couple of other teams, but we’ve got a lot of really experienced guys that know how to play the game.”
Two veterans who will probably log that key ice time are Alexander Steen and Paul Stastny, whom Hitchcock plans to play on a line with Tarasenko.
“We have a chance to load up the line, so when everybody is back (healthy), we will probably want to look at that combination,” Hitchcock said. “The great chemistry that Schwartz and (Vladimir) Sobotka have allows us to do that. The parts here have a chance to be real interchangeable because we’ve got a lot of guys that can play up and down. We’ve got so many options on how we’re going to build our lineup.”
That lineup will have only one way to play — tenaciously — and the influence of the ex-Wild coaches is expected to help that transition.
“This is the first time in five years that there’s going to be a significant change in a part of the system that we play,” Hitchcock said. “We’re able to cherry-pick what Minny did. Their team was built the same way that our team is going to be built this year, not really big on size, but a bunch of puck-hunters.”
Specifically, the Blues want to create more turnovers in the neutral zone. That’s where they struggled against Minnesota in the past, because they couldn’t figure out the “reads,” but Yeo and Wilson have passed that information along.
“They gave us fits and we wanted to know how they did it, so they explained it to us in detail and it fit our personnel perfectly, so we’re putting it in,” Hitchcock said. “It’s going to be a change, but the change is going to be good for the way we’re built.”
So don’t count Hitchcock among those worried about how the offseason has weakened the Blues. And you can thank a Blackhawk for opening his eyes.
“We have experienced players who have a lot of growth still in them and that part is exciting,” he said. “Everybody is good in the Central (Division), everybody. But who’s going to get better? Well, I look at us and we’ve got a real chance to get better because we’re not bringing in a bunch of first-year players and seeing if they can play. After talking to that (Chicago) guy, you know what, we’re in a great spot. There’s a lot of improving race horses on our team, and it’s our job as a coaching staff to get it out.”
