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Sunday, November 03, 2002

By Dejan Kovacevic, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

The way key players are dropping in St. Louis, it's enough to make you wonder if the Blues are being hit by a Straka-sized curse.

First, their top defenseman, Chris Pronger, went down with a wrist injury, perhaps for the entire season. He is nothing less than one of the game's best at his position.

Then, their top goaltender, Brent Johnson, went down with an ankle injury for a month. He was followed onto the injury list by the next four goaltenders on the depth chart within a span of two weeks.

Wednesday, their top forward, Keith Tkachuk, one of the league's most imposing figures in the slot, went down with a broken foot and will miss six weeks.

Yet somehow, the Blues rank third in the Western Conference standings, fueled by a six-game winning streak.

Whether they can stay there ...

"Same thing we did without Prongs and in the goaltending situation," Doug Weight told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "Everyone steps it up a bit, defensively first and foremost. We've got a real good team and a real deep team, too."

The newest face in the Blues' crease will be Tom Barrasso, expected to debut with his sixth NHL team sometime in the coming week. His contract is for one year at $900,000 with incentives for wins and games played. To be sure, one of the reasons Barrasso is hanging on at age 37 is that he needs 36 victories to reach 400. "I have no illusions of being a No. 1 guy or a No. 2," he told the Post-Dispatch. "I'm just thrilled to be playing again. I know my window to play this game is starting to close. The idea is to enjoy it as long as I can."

When the Penguins visited Detroit last week, Red Wings Coach Dave Lewis countered the Mario Lemieux line by loading up one of his own. And, after he put Sergei Fedorov between Brett Hull and Brendan Shanahan and watched Fedorov net a natural hat trick in a 7-3 rout, Lewis decided he wanted to stick with it and has for the past four games. If it stays together, the Penguins might have a race for high-scoring line by season's end.

By contrast, the poor Kings, with injuries to Jason Allison and Adam Deadmarsh, started a first line of Bryan Smolinski, Erik Rasmussen and Alexander Frolov Thursday in Chicago.

Fighting is down slightly this season, from 1.4 to 1.3 per game, which explains why players such as the Avalanche's Scott Parker are having a tough time getting into games. He has been scratched eight of the first nine games. Parker told the Rocky Mountain News the new rule enforcement is to blame, as the games now move too fast for much friction: "I don't think anyone will ever be able to take out fighting and the whole physical aspect of the game. I mean, that's hockey. If you change that, it won't be hockey anymore." For the record, Parker has three goals and 384 penalty minutes in 161 games. Now that's hockey.

Before Lemieux's name gets engraved on the Hart Trophy, voters will want to keep an eye on Denver, where Peter Forsberg continues to dominate at both ends as he did in the Stanley Cup playoffs this past spring. He is playing with a fire and freshness he attributes to taking off the 2001-02 regular season, partly for health reasons and partly to ponder retirement: "After the layoff, it made me realize how much hockey means to me."

A recent performance by Forsberg against Edmonton moved Oilers Coach Craig MacTavish to comment: "He's like Shaq, the way he takes the puck to the net."