CHICAGO - As his Cornell business degree indicates, Byron Bitz is no dummy, and he’s smart enough to know that his shift away from Marc Savard and the first line is not considered a demotion.
“I don’t look at it like that at all,’’ said Bitz, who skated with Blake Wheeler and David Krejci last night. “We tried it out. It may have worked at times. Probably not consistently enough to keep it going. We weren’t scoring, so you change it up. I don’t look at it as a slap in the face to me at all.’’
The coaching staff’s thinking was that with his smarts, size, and willingness to enter the dirty areas, Bitz would have been a good complement to Savard’s playmaking. All went according to plan against Toronto Dec. 5, when Savard netted a hat trick, with Bitz setting a screen on Joey MacDonald for a first-period goal.
But after the line produced nothing against the Flyers in a 3-1 loss Monday (Savard was on the ice for all three Philadelphia goals), Bitz was moved to the No. 3 line last night.
“Just because we took him off doesn’t mean he’s not a good player,’’ said coach Claude Julien. “He asked to play a role that he’s probably not used to. We had other lines that were going fairly well. We tried to stabilize it with him on the right side - his strength along the boards, his battle, his net-front presence would help. It wasn’t a one-man situation that it happened. He did a pretty good job of getting in front of the net. The day Savvy scored three goals, one of them was from his [Bitz’s] net-front presence. He still did a lot of good things. Just because he didn’t get the goals himself doesn’t mean he didn’t do anything productive for that line.
“The bottom line is that we know he’s more fitted for a different role. We just dealt with what we had to deal with. We knew it was going to be a short-term experiment anyway.’’
Entering last night, Bitz had three goals and five assists while averaging 12:12 of ice time per outing. With Krejci as his center, Bitz is expected to continue his game of cycling and doing the dirty work along the walls.
“Krech is a good player,’’ Bitz said. “Shouldn’t be that big of a change.’’
Brian Campbell is one of the lucky NHLers who participated in the first two Winter Classics. Campbell was on the Buffalo blue line two years ago when the Sabres and Penguins faced off at Ralph Wilson Stadium. Campbell was in a Chicago sweater last season for the Blackhawks-Red Wings match at Wrigley Field. According to Campbell, perhaps the toughest part of playing in both Winter Classics was dealing with the hoopla leading up to each event.
