Blues embrace adversity, Game 7
By Tom Wheatley
I guess that's why they call them the Blues.
The hockey gods have plotted against St. Louis since before training camp began. Why would the Stanley Cup playoffs be any different?
"It's been all season long like that," said winger Martin Rucinsky. "We'll have to do it the hard way again."
The Blues lost 447 man games to injury in the regular season, second only to Los Angeles, and still ran off 99 points. They were almost at full strength -- missing only three regulars -- when the playoffs began. And they twice had the Vancouver Canucks on the run during the Western Conference quarterfinals.
But instead of a sweep or five-game romp, the Blues blew a 3-1 series lead. They now face a winner-take-all Game 7 tonight in Vancouver.
And blew is the operative word ...
... As in the shoulder that captain Al MacInnis blew out early in Game 2 on a big hit by Todd Bertuzzi.
... As in the flu bug that blew through half the team in Game 5 and lingered in Game 6.
The Blues lost all three games -- barely -- by a total of four goals.
And when all hands are on deck, rather than leaning over the rail, the Blues make the Canucks look sick.
St. Louis won the opener by a touchdown, 6-0, in Vancouver. After losing MacInnis on the fly in Game 2 scuttled the power play in a 2-1 loss, the Blues quickly regrouped at home to win the next two games 3-1 and 4-1. That's a 13-2 scoring margin in the three wins.
But Scott Mellanby sat out Game 4 with the flu. Even though he was kept off the team plane for Vancouver, the virus weaseled its way through the team. A Blues source said 11 players were on intravenous for Game 5. No regulars started that game in sick bay, but Alexander Khavanov lasted just long enough to deflect a puck off his leg and into his own goal. That started the scoring in Vancouver's 5-3 win.
The recovering Blues had little jump in Game 6, once again trailing 4-1 before gutting out (so to speak) a third-period rally. The result was a 4-3 loss and a series tied at three games apiece. Afterward, Blues winger Cory Stillman said, "Guys are feeling better, but obviously it takes a couple days to get your strength back."
He and his teammates were most sick about the four straight penalties, all of them senseless, in the second period that let Vancouver pad its lead.
As the league's most-penalized team, discipline has been a season-long problem for the Blues. So has their goaltending.
Chris Osgood took a slashing penalty that led to a power-play goal. He was not sharp in net, showing why he was voted off Long Island at the trade deadline for a prospect. Naturally, untold cosmic factors were at work. Osgood was operating with an undisclosed leg injury that he suffered in Game 5.
"It doesn't matter how you're hurting or what you have," he said. "But we knew it wasn't going to be easy going in."
No kidding.
Job, the Biblical victim, has nothing on Joel Quenneville. The Blues coach has weathered every affliction but a plague of locusts.
This season, due to injuries and ineffectiveness, the Blues tied an NHL record by using seven goalies. A week before camp, starting goalie Brent Johnson went down with a high ankle strain suffered during a shinny session. He missed the first 27 games, plus another five later with a groin strain, and was mostly ineffective when healthy.
With Johnson out early, the Blues won four straight games with an NHL-record four different goalies -- three of them rookies. One of them was Reinhard Divis, the best goalie in all of Austria. He promptly pulled a muscle, missed half the season and was about to be recalled from the minors when he was shelved again ... by a spider bite.
Scoring leader Pavol Demitra missed four games with the chicken pox.
Center Doug Weight, who missed two games after taking a shot off an ankle at the All-Star Game, missed 10 games after a rival goalie cleared the puck off his face near the net.
A bout of food poisoning sidelined five players, weakened up to 10 others and left only 18 players on skates for a December loss in New Jersey.
Power forward Keith Tkachuk missed 26 games from injury and suspension, and still scored 31 goals.
Defenseman Jeff Finley was suspended four games for reaching out of the penalty box to stop Derian Hatcher from pounding Demitra, a pacifist, during a melee with Dallas.
All-Star defenseman Chris Pronger, the incumbent captain, missed the first 77 games after radical knee and wrist surgeries.
Bruising winger Jamal Mayers has been out since November after knee surgery.
Winger Martin Rucinsky missed a dozen games with a bum shoulder.
Rookie center Petr Cajanek missed two dozen games with a broken leg, got back in gear, missed three weeks with a head injury and just returned during Game 6.
Center Steve Dubinsky, who was emerging as the team's best faceoff man, has been out for three months with a concussion. Coincidentally or not, the Canucks are beating the Blues to the draw, 58 percent to 42 percent, the best and worst faceoff rankings in the first round.
For all of that, the Blues wound up with the No. 5 seed in the wild, wild Western Conference.
They did so despite a dangerous habit of giving up the game's first goal, which has carried over to the postseason.
Before leaving St. Louis for Game 7, a reporter reminded Osgood that his new team has done nothing the easy way.
"Neither have I," said Osgood. "I don't expect anything less the way things have been going for me."
Osgood had a late-season ankle injury with the Islanders. But his early problems were the same self-inflicted wounds that made him expendable in Detroit after winning a Cup. Namely, a suspect work ethic, a fuzzy focus and a blind spot on shots high to the glove side. Osgood has buckled down in St. Louis, stopped the goalie-go-round and started fans chanting "Oz-zie, Oz-zie'' as they used to do for Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith. This Ozzie doesn't have the same kind of heralded glove, but some pucks seem almost fated to sneak in. In Game 6, the first Vancouver goal banked in off Khavanov, a flashback to Game 5.
"It's amazing,'' said Khavanov, still looking like a whiter shade of pale. "There's been so much stuff all year."
"We've just been snake-bit,'' said Osgood, who hit town too late to know that "spider-bit'' is a more apt term.
After the flu plague struck and helped force Game 7 in a hostile rink, another team might groan and say, "Why us?" The Blues grin and say, "Why not?"
"As long as there's seven games, we're still OK,'' said Blues defenseman Bryce Salvador. "We've just got to win Game 7, and everyone will forget all the other stuff that happened.''
Unless the locusts are swarming by game time.