In all of their success these past few seasons, the Blackhawks have gotten the clutch performances and some of those bounces. How we got here was… we gave them our best shots early and they gave us their best shot (Saturday).
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St. Louis Blues Jori Lehtera (C) is congratulated by teammates after scoring a goal against the Chicago Blackhawks in the first period at the Scottrade Center in St. Louis on April 25, 2016. Watch Blackhawks vs Blues online free live streaming tonight for Game 7, one of the greatest spectacles in all of sports. That was the difference in a marvelous series between two teams worthy of the Stanley Cup Final. “Someone the other day said, “Blackhawks lead this series three-three” and I thought that was ideal”. We have knowledge now of what it takes and now we’ve got to use it. It’s the emotional knowledge of how deep you had to dig. It kick-started the end-to-end theatre with the Hawks controlling the first half with Patrick Kane unstoppable as he played on two different lines (14 different shifts) – Jonathan Toews and Artem Anisimov – then the Blues battled back as a dialled-in Crawford had to rob Fabbri with a blocker thrust and a later flash-the-leather stop on Vladimir Tarasenko in the high slot. Pairing them usually leads to scoring. The middle period has yielded a 10-2 goal advantage for Chicago so that’s something to keep an eye on. Even the ultra-nuclear option of Kane, Toews and Artemi Panarin failed to make a difference. All smiles back there right now and we’ve got a tough task again against Dallas coming up, a team we play very tough and they played us very tough. “For a while people were saying this series looked like it was probably going to come down to one goal at the end, and it did”.
The St Louis Blues are already being labeled as chokers for blowing a 3-1 series and letting the Blackhawks roar back to tie the series at three and force a seventh and decisive game.
They tied it 2-2 on a freakish power-play goal by Andrew Shaw 3 minutes, 20 seconds into the period. The Blues had not played a Game 7 since 2003, when they lost to Vancouver after leading the series three games to one. It was put up or shut up time for the good guys.
“I just tried to stay with it, knowing the magnitude of the game, knowing how everything’s been going”, Brouwer added. “All we were trying to do is make them make one mistake”. St. Louis grabbed a 2-1 lead on a slap shot by Pietrangelo with 11:09 remaining in the first period. But that’s where the comeback stopped.
“There’s never a right path”, Blues forward Scottie Upshall said. “Pretty quick right after to put everything right after into words”. “Obviously, we’re going to have a longer summer this year”. PPs-Anaheim 1 of 2; Nashville 0 of 1. “We did a lot of good things, made a lot of hard plays that needed to be made so we could get to this moment and have these positive interviews after round one, the way we set out to have”. And maybe, more importantly, they’re spiritually closer. They’ve had a lot of success lately but that doesn’t take the sting away this spring. They’re hungry for more even after a nice early-round meal.
Unsung player of the game: Alex Pietrangelo has been the unsung player in every game of this series, putting up monster minutes and monster presence.
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“It’s fun having short summers”, defenseman Duncan Keith said.
