(4-13-26) Wild-Blues Gameday Lineup

ST. LOUIS – The St. Louis Blues knew their fate during their 5-3 win against the Chicago Blackhawks on Saturday.

They followed through and won the hockey game despite knowing their playoff fate had been sealed when they were eliminated for the third time in four seasons.

Now with three games remaining in the regular season, including Monday’s 7 p.m. game against the Minnesota Wild (45-23-12), who will be going to the playoffs, what’s left for them to accomplish?

Plenty, according to coach Jim Montgomery, who along with his coaching staff and management, will have a keen eye on who approaches these so-called meaningless, play-out-the-string games and how they take them.

“We’re just trying to see who’s going to compete in these games, because there’s a lot of games in the regular season that are like this that we were playing three in four and you need a gut-check and who’s going to have a gut check,” Montgomery said. “Today, that’s about personal pride, how you want to represent yourself and the St. Louis Blues organization. I said this after the first period in Chicago, you only have so many games in your career, and do you want to look back and you want to lay an egg in one of these games where you could have been good for your team? It’s not going to change. We all understand human nature, but the competitive fire that has been in you since you were an eight-year-old to play in this game, it’s either there at eight years old and it’s there when you’re 28. If it’s not there when you’re eight years old, it’s not going to be there when you’re 28.”

That means for those tank-a-thon fans that want to see the Blues (34-33-12) lose out to get the best possible draft lottery result, don’t count on losing in so-called on-purpose fashion.

When the Blues were as much as 14 points out of a wild card in the Western Conference at one point, and 12 back coming out of the Olympic break, all the talk was about tanking and getting as high a lottery pick as possible.

But they have gone 14-5-3 since and got to as close as three points of reaching the goal of playoffs. It was a good run, yes, but in the end, it all meant nothing because of the results that were troublesome earlier in the season.

But Montgomery has learned at least something out of this recent push.

“That there’s some young guys emerging that possibly can be really good players in this team in the future,” he said.

But there’s also that analogy of needing to figure out an 82-game season, and not a good stretch of the the season, like the last 22 games.

“I try not to get too excited about playing really well when you’re so far out of it,” Montgomery said. “There’s so many teams … you look at the NFL, I looked at one year, the Redskins were 0-8 and they finished 8-8 … this team’s set to go to the Super Bowl; they were 4-12 the next year. There’s a lot of people that make a livelihood of being really good when your team’s basically eliminated. We need to find more players that want to be really good right from the start of the year, and that’s something as an organization that we have to instill and something that we’re going to try and make sure we do from the start of the year next year.

“Sorry to not give you a great answer for your question, but it annoys me at times. Not the question, the performance.”

So with games against the Wild, Pittsburgh Penguins on Tuesday and Utah Mammoth to close out 2025-26 on Thursday, what will be evaluated?

“You see the guys that keep competing,” Montgomery said. ‘Who’s cheating for offense, who’s trying not to play the right way for the team but they do play the right way when it’s convenient for them. The guys that play the right way all the time, and that’s something that we’ve been harping on, something we talked about for the last 40 minutes in Chicago. We want to play the right way. In the end at the end of your career, you want to know that you do the reunion where you played with your teammates and they know that you gave them everything they had, that they can rely on you. That’s the sign of a great teammate.”

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The Blues will play a version of the Wild that resembles more of a preseason lineup than the regular-season version.

Minnesota will not dress, among their top players, Matt Boldy, Joel Eriksson Ek, Mats Zuccarello, Ryan Hartman, Quinn Hughes and Kirill Kaprizov, due to rest purposes.

Minnesota is locked in as the No. 3 seed in the Central Division and will play No. 2 Dallas Stars in the first round.

“I think it’s two years in a row that it’s going to be in the Central Division that a Stanley Cup contender is going to be eliminated in the first round,” Montgomery said. “Do I think that’s fair? Life isn’t fair, that’s the rules, so they’ve got to play by them. The person that’s going to win the Stanley Cup has to go through the best teams at some point. Just the way it is.

“… They’ve used a different lineup the last three games, I think, since everybody’s been locked into their position. They’re heavy on the third and fourth lines, they’re skilled and talented and fiercely competitive on the first two. They’re deep on defense. This is a really good hockey team that is built for the playoffs, in my opinion.”

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The Blues will make a couple changes to their forward lines, including inserting Jonathan Drouin and Jack Finley in against the wild, in place of Jonatan Berggren and Oskar Sundqvist.

Joel Hofer will start in goal, meaning Jordan Binnington will get the home finale -- and perhaps his final game in front of the home crowd (?) on Tuesday against the Penguins.

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Blues Projected Lineup:

Dylan Holloway-Robert Thomas-Jimmy Snuggerud

Pavel Buchnevich-Pius Suter-Jordan Kyrou

Jake Neighbours-Dalibor Dvorsky-Jonathan Drouin

Alexey Toropchenko-Jack Finley-Otto Stenberg

Philip Broberg-Logan Mailloux

Theo Lindstein-Colton Parayko

Cam Fowler-Tyler Tucker

Joel Hofer will start in goal; Jordan Binnington will be the backup.

Healthy scratches include Justin Holl, Jonatan Berggren, Matthew Kessel, Oskar Sundqvist and Nathan Walker. The Blues report no injuries.

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Wild Projected Lineup:

Yakov Trenin-Danila Yurov-Vladimir Tarasenko

Marcus Johansson-Hunter Haight-Bobby Brink

Nico Sturm-Michael McCarron-Nick Foligno

Robby Fabbri-Ben Jones-Nicolas Aube-Kubel

Jonas Brodin-Jared Spurgeon

Jake Middleton-Brock Faber

Daemon Hunt-Matt Kiersted

Filip Gustavsson will start in goal; Jesper Wallstedt will be the backup.

Healthy scratches include Mats Zuccarello, Joel Eriksson Ek, Zach Bogosian, Jeff Petry, Viking Gustafsson-Nyberg, Matt Boldy, Marcus Foligno, Ryan Hartman, Quinn Hughes, and Kirill Kaprozov. The Wild report no injuries.

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