TAMPA, Fla. — Chicago Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville is not about to be pinned down on whether, or how much, he will play Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane on the same line in the Stanley Cup final opener, or the series in general.
“Last two games, they were so good together, it’s tough to get them apart now,” Quenneville said at the team’s morning skate prior to Game 1. “We’ll see how the game goes matchup-wise. Certainly have some balance if you get them apart.”
“Can you overthink it?” someone asked.
“Overthink it would be breaking them up, is that what you’re saying?” the coach smiled. “We’ll see.”
MOVE, COUNTERMOVE: Lightning head coach Jon Cooper sounded content to do just that: wait and see.
“Joel changes lines quite a bit. I can’t predict what he’s going to do,” Cooper said. “I’m fairly certain the lineup he starts with won’t be the lineup he finishes with.”
Either way, he trusts his top forwards to do the job.
“Sometimes we got to be best on best. You’re not going to pull a rabbit out of your hat and say we have some magic scheme,” said Cooper. “Just be better than the next guy. That’s what you have to do. You have to challenge yourself. Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane are two of the best players this league has seen in a long time. But we feel Steven Stamkos, Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat, we go down our list and think, maybe we’re not too bad ourselves. Let’s prove to everybody you can play against these guys.”
After a suitable pause, he grinned. “In saying that, they’ll probably see a high dose of (defencemen) Victor Hedman and Anton Stralman.”
THE IMITATION GAME: For those who think NHL clubs tend to follow the lead of the league’s most successful teams, the Stanley Cup final is a godsend — two very fast, very skilled lineups.
That said, the Lightning won Games 5 and 7 of the Eastern final on the road in New York by shutting down (and shutting out) the Rangers — and both they and the Blackhawks realize they can’t let the other club run wild.
“We’re going to have to slow each other down somehow,” said Brad Richards, the Hawks’ No. 2 centre, who won the Cup here with Tampa 11 years ago. “Our team is built more on trying to have the puck. That’s how we try to slow down people. If we have the puck, they can’t get going. But we’ll see how that goes. Every game’s different. You never know what kind of personality a series takes.”
NEW POP: Chicago forward Kris Versteeg had an unscheduled diversion from his trip to Tampa, rushing back to Toronto to be there with his wife Brittany for birth of their first child, Jaxson James.
They never considered calling him Stanley, Versteeg said, “but I have gotten that question quite often.
“I was on the way to the rink on Monday and got the call she was being induced, so within two seconds I called the team and they did everything for me,” he said. “It’s amazing what the Blackhawks do for their players. It means the world to me that they helped me get there. I only got to see him for a couple of hours, but it was worth it.”
He rejoined the team on Tuesday.
NO MIRACLE: Lightning defenceman Matt Carle is in his second Stanley Cup final, having played in Philly when the Flyers lost to the 2010 Blackhawks. There’s no comparison, he said.
“That year, we had gone through a coaching change (John Stevens to Peter Laviolette), we didn’t get into the playoffs until the shootout in game 82. So it was a struggle for us throughout the whole regular season,” said the 30-year-old from Anchorage, Alaska. “Where this year I felt like this was a goal from Day 1 for us and it’s just been building towards it, so it’s not a surprise to be here.
“I don’t want to say (the Flyers) were happy to be there, but it wasn’t like it was expected the way the regular season had gone. We had gone on kind of a Cinderella playoff run. I think we were a seventh seed getting to the Stanley Cup final. This year was a lot different than that.”
RUNNING JOKE: Considering how effective the Chicago Blackhawks have been despite playing primarily four defencemen, the daily questions about whether Trevor Van Riemsdyk will be brought into the lineup seem an odd fixation at coach Joel Quenneville’s news conferences.
Van Riemsdyk hasn’t played a minute of NHL hockey since fracturing his kneecap in mid-November, and when he returned to the Hawks’ AHL farm team in Rockford, Ill., he injured his wrist and hasn’t played since.
Wednesday, Quenneville said “he’s real close” to returning, which could mean … well, just about anything. The Hawks have rotated a number of bodies through the No. 5 and 6 slots, including veteran Kimmo Timonen, David Rundblad and Kyle Cumiskey.
ccole@vancouversun.com
Twitter.com/rcamcole
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