On the blue line, where Friday’s import of Tomas Kaberle provides a huge upgrade on the power-play point, the Black and Gold could used added depth. Long playoff runs can extract many pounds of flesh, and typically they get taken out of the backliners’ hides.
“I’ll take any help I can get, to be honest,’’ coach Claude Julien said following yesterday morning’s brief workout at Ristuccia Arena, when asked if he’d prefer Chiarelli bring in help at forward or defense. “The one thing you want is some depth, and that’s the one place we might have hurt ourselves a little bit last year. [David] Krejci was hurt and Savvy was just coming back [from concussion]. We got thin pretty quick and I think that really took away our chances and hurt us a lot in that area. So I think we are trying to cover that right now and if he brought people in it would just mean more depth.’’
Realistically, given that elite centers and snipers are among the game’s rarest commodities, Chiarelli has the best chance at landing extra blue line help. His space against the salary cap is minimal, but that may be all he needs to bring in a guy only expected to suit up because of injury or to fill in for one of the youngsters, Adam McQuaid or Steven Kampfer. McQuaid has fewer than 100 minutes of postseason time on ice and Kampfer, although a pleasant upgrade to the back line’s overall mobility, was fresh off the Michigan (CCHA) campus when the Stanley Cup was contested last June.
“I don’t anticipate anything big,’’ said Chiarelli, thinking ahead to Monday. “If there is something, it will be smaller. And now we have some time to see how our squad unfolds here in the next week and a bit. We are on the board three times [with Friday’s deals] and we got the guys we wanted to get. So we have some flexibility.’’
