A strong December is a bright spot the Blues are hopeful to build upon. For the past two seasons, Blues fans might have been more excited to open their December credit card statements than peek at the NHL standings. This season, in the midst of an 11-game losing streak, the Blues fell 15 points behind the eighth-place team for the final playoff spot in the Western Conference by mid-December.
In 2005-06, the club was out of the postseason race by Christmas and, with 57 points for the season, finished 38 behind Edmonton for the final playoff spot in the West. Throw in the NHL lockout in 2004-05, and it has been more than three seasons since fans in this town had any desire to look at the standings while sipping their morning coffee. The reality isn't that fans should begin calling 622-BLUE to inquire about playoff tickets; however, they no longer have to snap through their newspapers or turn down their TVs to avoid the standings.
With 31 points, the Blues are just 10 behind the eighth-place Vancouver Canucks with 44 games to play, and they could make it a single-digit difference with a win tonight over Chicago. The Blues (12-19-7) have played 10 games under Andy Murray, and their 5-2-3 record including 5-0-3 in their last eight games is the ninth-best mark in the NHL in that stretch of games. It's not a huge climb, but in two weeks the club has made up five points on the last playoff team in the West.
You almost didn't want to look at the standings for a couple of years, Blues forward Keith Tkachuk said. But now, we've put ourselves in a position where we can get right back in the thick of things. Murray is cognizant of the Blues' improved status and wants the players to feel good about climbing back in the mix.
But Murray says he will leave that kind of talk to the fans and media. The first assignment here was to be competitive and to win hockey games, which they hadn't done in a while, Murray said. So, we accomplished that.
Then, it's just trying to set a standard for the way that we play ...
try and make our players better. Right now, we're just trying to get better as a team. In a scheduling quirk, the Blues will face Chicago on two of the next three nights at Scottrade Center.
The Blackhawks won't return home on the off day Wednesday, making the back-to-back games seem somewhat like a playoff schedule. But what should make the atmosphere postseason-like is that Chicago has been resurgent under new coach Denis Savard and, with 37 points, the Blackhawks are one of the teams the Blues must catch in the standings. It has to be (like a playoff), Tkachuk said.
They're right there, too, and they've beaten us the last couple of times. We've been getting good starts, and we want to continue to do that. They're (six) points ahead of us, Weight said.
Denis is behind the bench, and they've rallied behind him. It's a team we've got to pass. One thing about being 10 points out: We're still in 15th place.
We're going to have to pass a lot of teams. Knowing that makes Weight think about games earlier in the season, when we were right there, knocking on the door ..
. the leads we relinquished. But we can't look back at what has been.
The thing we're looking at is, we're 10 points back and we're not at the 41-game mark ...
the halfway mark ...
yet. I've been in a spot where we were in sixth or seventh place and looking down at those teams thinking they were out of it. I hope that's what people are thinking about us.
But in this room, we're planning on playing (deep) into April.
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