from Jeremy P. Rutherford of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,

The club has defined its re-conditioned look as having defensemen that don’t give up much ground in their own zone, pounce on pucks as a five-man unit and initiate quick counterattacks.“I don’t think it’ll be drastic changes to the normal fan,” captain David Backes said. “I think if you’re really looking into the game, you may see some very detailed things that are options for us if we see a read or we see something that we can capitalize on. But it’s subjective to situational play. In practice, it’s one thing. In games, you can’t really free-wheel or it’s an odd-man rush and against a potent team we’re playing (Thursday), you make too many mistakes and they put crooked numbers up in a hurry.“We’re going to have to evaluate that and judge our risk-reward level as we go. It’s not going to be end-to-end to end odd-man rushes, but we feel we’ve got a few more opportunities to hem teams in, to capitalize on those chances, to make them make mistakes and then turn those into goals. But it’s still Blues’ hockey, it’s blue-collar and we’re going out there to work our butts off.”

“More than anything,” Shattenkirk added, “it’s just a matter of keeping the offensive mindset the entire game. I think we have a tendency to play defensively, especially in Hitch’s system. He’s just pushing us now to really get into that mindset of when we get that puck, let’s go and let’s go score a goal. Not worrying as much about possession as getting pucks and creating good scoring chances. The onus is especially on the (defense) to jump in the rush every single chance we get.”

But Hitchcock readily admitted Wednesday, that it’s still a work in progress.“I think we’re in the early stages of the learning curve,” he said. “You hope you don’t get burned if you make a mistake, but I think the guys have been great at wanting the feedback and the evaluation. With the way we’re built and the way our defense is reconstructed, we can play this way. We’ve got smart guys back there, we’ve got mobility back there, we’ve got guys with great hockey sense, so I think we can really take advantage."

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