Throwdown Lowdown – Blues @ Canucks 1-27-10

Chris Thorburn is all like, "STAY HERE, TANNER!" Image via treehugger.com (of ALL places!)

As expected, the fists flew in Stampede City on Monday night.  As anticipated, one of the fights was between Cam Janssen and Brandon Prust.  And as we all know he can, Janssen took down Prust, with an impressive finish to boot.  Unfortunately, Janssen got involved with Brian McGrattan earlier in a matchup that proved to be a bit much for Cam.  So with the 1-1-0 record on the evening, Janssen moves to 8-3-2 on the season.  The Blues as a team are now 21-13-11 and hold tight at the 5th spot for number of fights on the season with 45 – only one behind the Tampa Bay Lightning.

So now it’s our “good pals” from Canada’s beautiful Pacific Southwest, the Vancouver Canucks.  There have been three games between the two already this season – two at home, one at their place – and all 5 fights that took place were in St. Louis.  There were four fights on November 10th – Kevin Bieksa and BJ Crombeen traded victories and Janssen worked a draw with Darcy Hordichuk before defeating Tanner Glass later.  In the New Year’s Eve game, Rick Rypien defeated Janssen amid controversy over tape on his hand, which he received a game misconduct for.  So Vancouver is 2-2-1 against the Blues this season in fights and they’re 14-9-18 in 41 scraps this season – the 41 fights represents 7th place in the NHL in ’09-’10.

As most of us know, Vancouver has several players willing to drop the gloves.  I count 9 different Canucks with fights – 6 of which have shed the gloves multiple times on the season.  The leader of the pack is center Rypien (5’11″, 170lbs, 4-2-5).  We are not guaranteed that Rypien will fight in this game, as he just returned on Monday from a bout with food poisoning.  We’re also not likely to see defenseman and “old friend”, Bieksa (6’0″, 205lbs, 3-1-1).  He is on injured reserve with a leg laceration.  Another defenseman who may be out is Willie Mitchell (6’3″, 210lbs, 0-0-2) – he’s day-to-day with a concussion.  This leaves us with three other Canucks players involved in multiple fights – wingers Glass (6’0″, 200lbs, 4-2-4) and Hordichuk (6’1″, 215lbs, 3-2-4) and center Ryan Kesler (6’2″, 205lbs, 0-2-0 and fresh off getting destroyed by Andrew Ladd of the Chicago Blackhawks).

There’s still bad blood between these two teams stemming from last year’s playoff series, so you can expect pretty much anything as far as pugilistic activities in this game.  But your best bets begin and end with any combination of Janssen, Crombeen or Brad Winchester (who has a lot to prove after his fight on Saturday) against Glass, Hordichuk or Rypien.  Maybe we’ll get lucky and David Backes will return to take on a member of someone’s Olympic squad.  Since we can eliminate Team Canada goaltender Roberto Luongo, we’ll go to other participating nations: Kesler is a Team USA teammate, Henrik and Daniel Sedin are on Team Sweden, old friend Pavol Demitra is on Team Slovakia and Sami Salo is on Team Finland but is currently day-to-day with a groin issue.  The options for Backes are admittedly light here, so if he’s looking for a fight, he may want to sit out one more game.  Oh, who am I kidding?!  BRING HIM BACK!!!!!

Two in a row in Western Canada?  Why, that sure would be swell, wouldn’t it?

LET’S GO BLUES!!!!!

Information obtained via the incomparable Fried Chicken’s Hockey Fights