In the playoffs last spring, Ken Hitchcock and his former team, the St. Louis Blues, eliminated the Dallas Stars in seven games. Hitchcock is nothing if not a gracious winner, and he praised the Stars on the way out.
“They are the future of the NHL,” he said that night after a Game 7 win. “They are where the NHL is going. That’s what they are.”
In that series, the Stars gave the more experienced Blues all they could handle, and they did it without Tyler Seguin. They also had a style that was very uncharacteristic of teams like the Blues and Los Angeles Kings that had experienced success in the West.