Adam Clendening Jersey Womens

[officialsbaseball]

ST. LOUIS — The St. Louis Blues will have a decidedly new look when the puck drops on the team’s season opener as it hosts the Winnipeg Jets on Thursday night.The Blues are going with a youth movement as prospects Robert Thomas , Jordan Kyrou and Sammy Blais all made the roster. Blais is the old man of the group at age 22. Thomas, regarded as one of the Blues’ top prospects, is 19 and Kyrou is 20.What they lack for in experience, St. Louis hopes they make up for in skill.Article continues below ...Blais, who played in 11 games last season, scored a team-high four preseason goals.“It’s a great feeling,” Blais told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “This year I just wanted to stay here all year and keep working hard and do what I did during the preseason.”Thomas had a goal and three assists in the preseason.“It’s obviously tough when coming in, with the environment and everything, and some pressure on you,” Thomas told the Post-Dispatch. “Whenever you’re trying to make a team, you always focus on stuff , (but) sometimes it’s just better to relax and have fun each day.”Kyrou scored a goal and an assist in the preseason opener in Dallas on Sept. 18. He added two more assists to cement a roster spot.“I just feel a lot more comfortable out there (this year),” Kyrou told the Post-Dispatch. “My speed is a big factor, so I really feel like I can skate out there, create a lot of opportunities.”The trio joins veterans Pat Maroon, Ryan O’Reilly and David Perron as newcomers. All six players start the season as part of the Blues’ top 12 forwards.The Blues start the season with no reserve forwards and will carry nine defensemen, two more than usual. The team elected to go with the extra defensemen as Robert Bortuzzo will serve the final game of a three-game suspension against the Jets and Joel Edmundson is dealing with a groin injury.The Blues and Jets split their four games last season, with each team winning one and losing one on home ice.After a 114-point season and a second-place finish in the rugged Central Division, the Jets are dealing with high expectations. ESPN ranked the Jets No. 1 in its preseason power rankings and nine of Sportsnet’s NHL Insiders predicted that the team will win the Stanley Cup this season.Jets coach Paul Maurice said the team isn’t interested in what others are saying.“They all have a really good understanding of the value of a prediction,” Maurice told NHL.com. “We don’t want to downplay it. Go through the list and find one that was picked first, won the Presidents (Trophy) and won the Cup. Right, there’s a bunch of good teams at the top and there’s a bunch of really good teams that miss the playoffs. It happens every year. And you don’t want to be that team , right? You want to be that team over the course of the year that gets stronger and gets better.“We believe we have enough talent now to be a good team but an understanding that maybe that’s a smaller fraction of the whole pie that goes into having a year like last year.” COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) The Columbus Blue Jackets got plenty of lucky breaks in their surprisingly successful 2016-17 season.Serious injuries were avoided, their power play was one of the NHL’s best, and goalie Sergei Bobrovsky won the Vezina Trophy. Pucks bounced the Blue Jackets’ way more often than not as they piled up a 16-game winning streak and earned a playoff spot, just one season removed from a last-place finish in the Metropolitan Division.Good fortune has been a little bit harder to come by this season for the Blue Jackets, who are in danger of fading out of the playoff picture in the Metro. Injuries have taken some of the team’s best players out of action for big chunks of time. The power-play is worst in the league. The penalty-kill is only slightly better.”We’re spoiled because of the year we had last year when everything went our way, we got breaks, we were healthy, a lot of things went our way,” said Columbus coach John Tortorella after the Blue Jackets outshot Washington 39-25 on Tuesday night but lost the game when Nicklas Backstrom scored with 43 seconds left.”As I’ve always said, we forced them to go our way for the most part , but you do get some luck in a year,” he said. ”We had a ton of it. We’ve got (crap) for luck right now.”Forwards Cam Atkinson, Brandon Dubinsky, Nick Foligno and Boone Jenner – players expected to be top goal scorers – all were slow to get started. Atkinson just got back on the ice after missing a month with a broken foot. A fractured orbital bone sustained in a fight Dec. 12 sidelined Dubinsky for six weeks. He just got back in the lineup, scoring the tying goal in the third period Tuesday night.Jenner missed the first seven games of the season with an injury. Center Alexander Wennberg and defenseman Zach Werenski also have been out with hurts.Those players were expected to shoulder the load. Instead it’s been wingers Artemi Panarin, Josh Anderson and Oliver Bjorkstrand, as well as all-star defenseman Seth Jones. Their production has kept the Blue Jackets in playoff contention, but every other team in the Metro Division is within reach, too.Bobrovsky is eighth in the league in wins, and his .920 save percentage is down from the cumulative .931 of last season. Columbus has lost four straight and nine of the last 11, but Tortorella sees progress.”It’s been that way most of the year here , where things just haven’t totally gone our way in games,” he said. ”Somehow we’ve got to have the wherewithal to keep finding ourselves, keep staying with it, and turn these games into wins and try to get on a run.”On Tuesday, the Blue Jackets moved the puck effectively and went hard at Washington goalie Braden Holtby in a 3-2 loss that Tortorella described as ”a kick in the stomach.””We were around the net a lot,” Jones said. ”A bounce here and a bounce there is a couple more goals for us.”Columbus will get another crack at the Capitals in Washington on Friday night. Six of the next seven games are against Metro Division rivals, so that stretch is likely to determine whether the Blue Jackets will return to the playoffs. There haven’t been back-to-back playoff years in the 18-year history of the franchise.”It’s a grind,” Dubinsky said. ”It’s a long season. Nobody said it was going to be easy for us. It’s hard right now, not getting the results. I think we’re putting in some good minutes. We just have to come to work tomorrow with our heads up and be ready and willing to get better.”—