Flyers at Blues Preview

The Filthadelphia Flyers are in town tonight to face off against the St.Louis Blues. If you’re going to the game, make sure you pick up a copy of the paper (along with a 18-pack of D batteries in honor of our Philly guests) on your way in, and if you’re watching from home, buy a digital copy here.

Regarding tonight's lineup, Blues Head Coach Ken Hitchcock made a few changes over the break and liked what he saw in Tuesday's practice.

"We've made some decisions lineup-wise that are changes from what we had before," Hitchcock said. "This is a more familiar group that we've got going right now, and we wanted to see how it looked. Guys are excited. We've got significant opponents coming up, so we wanted to get as much continuity as we could."

Here is the projected lineup for tonight's game against the Flyers:

[NHL.com]

Forwards

Alexander Steen - Jori Lehtera - Vladimir Tarasenko

Jaden Schwartz - Paul Stastny - David Perron

Robby Fabbri - Patrik Berglund - Dmitrij Jaskin

Scottie Upshall - Kyle Brodziak - Ryan Reaves

Defense

Joel Edmundson - Alex Pietrangelo

Carl Gunnarsson - Kevin Shattenkirk

Jay Bouwmeester - Colton Parayko

Goalie

Carter Hutton

The Flyers' projected lineup:

Taylor Leier-Claude Giroux-Jakub Voracek

Travis Konecny-Brayden Schenn-Wayne Simmonds

Nick Cousins-Sean Couturier-Dale Weise

Chris VandeVelde-Pierre-Edouard Bellemare-Roman Lyubimov

Ivan Provorov-Andrew MacDonald

Michael Del Zotto-Radko Gudas

Nick Schultz-Shayne Gostisbehere

Steve Mason

[KSDK]

Philly has three main offensive weapons in their lineup - Giroux, Voracek, and Simmonds - and between those three, they’ve collectively notched 95 points in 35 games. Petro and Bouwmeester will have their hands full trying to contain all of them. The Flyers are dangerous on the power play, and the Blues will have to play a tight and disciplined game.

Paul Stastny is also back in the lineup tonight after a brief stint in the pressbox due to injury. Carter Hutton will get the start in net - Hitchcock told Jeremy Rutherford of the Post-Dispatch that he wanted to ‘reward’ a guy ‘who competed like heck’ and who in the goshdarned heck can argue Hutts didn’t have a decent outing last game? Allen is slated to get the start against the Predators, and the big start against the Hawks in the Winter Classic, so makes good sense to sit Jakey tonight.

Stats!

From Sportingcharts.com