Blues vs Canadiens: The Price Is Wrong

Tonight the Blues travel to Montreal to take on the Canadiens. Puck drops at 6:30 CT and can be seen on Fox Sports Midwest.

Tonight is a story of two teams traveling in opposite directions.

The Blues are in the middle of a three game losing streak while the Canadiens have won five straight, including a 10-1 drumming of the Detroit Red Wings. Obligatory Detroit sucks.

For the one or two people in the world who didn’t already think that this Canadiens team revolved around starting goaltender Carey Price the end of October thru the later half of November should’ve made a believer out of them.

This was a Montreal team who not less than 15 days ago were teetering on the brink of failure. There were talks of trades, firings and new hirings, and every other sort of drama that comes with playing losing hockey in Canada.

However, once the golden child returned from injured reserve all was well north of the border.

For a team that was hovering around the bottom of the Atlantic division it is impressive how they have once again worked themselves into a playoff position.

Granted a five game winning streak will do wonders for a team’s position in the standings but I think it also goes to show how even things are throughout the entire NHL.

A team can literally go for zero to hero in less than a month and can fall back to earth just as quickly.

Speaking of falling back to earth, the Blues have stumbled a bit during their last three games.

With losses to Anaheim Ducks, LA Kings and an overtime loss to the Minnesota Wild the Blues are still struggling to regain their earlier form.

While the team still walked away without a win on Saturday night there were some definite signs of improvement.

The power play is starting to pick up a little. While it’s true that the Blues really had nowhere to go but up, it is still a good sign.

Patrik Berglund has two goals in three games. Sure both came on the power play but many of us were hopeful that his return would provide some much needed depth scoring and so far, he has produced.

Blues controlled the pace of pay for much of Saturday night’s game and while they were unable to secure a victory if you continue to out-shoot your opponent almost 2 to 1 more often than not good things will happen.

Wednesday and Friday night’s game were throwaways, you will have them every now and then. Saturday night was definitely something to build off of.

In order to keep momentum moving forward it appears that Mike Yeo will use the same lineup as he did against the Wild.

According to the Post-Dispatch the lines at Monday’s practice had not changed since Saturday.

Vince Dunn, Chris Thorburn and Oskar Sundqvist are out. Dmitrij Jaskin, Magnus Paajarvi and Robert Bortuzzo are in. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Thanks for reading and Go Blues.