St. Louis has problems of its own, mostly on the back end. Torey Krug is on long-term IR with an ankle, Tyler Tucker is weeks away after knee surgery, and Logan Mailloux is on IR too. Up front, Dillon Dube and Alexey Toropchenko are on IR. The Blues lost their first 3 of this stretch to Colorado, Chicago and San Jose and scored 5 goals total across them. Then they beat Columbus 5-3 at home and buried Ottawa 7-2 on the road. Ottawa was on a back-to-back and missing 4 regular defensemen, so the 7 deserves an asterisk.
The Blues' projected lineup in Ottawa, per the club, ran Dylan Holloway with Robert Thomas and Jimmy Snuggerud on the top line, with Pavel Buchnevich on the 3rd and Dylan Peterson making his NHL debut on the 4th. Joel Hofer was in net. Neither team has named a goalie for Thursday. Both clubs played on Oct. 13 and get Wednesday off, so neither has a rest edge. The difference is that Minnesota is coming off its 2nd game in 2 nights and St. Louis isn't.
Minnesota's results look a lot like its injury list. The Wild lost a pair of 3-2 games in Buffalo and Tampa, then won 4-1 in Florida and 4-2 at home against Vegas, and the Vegas game is where the defensemen started going down. The Wild are 4-2-1 and the Blues are 3-2-1 as of Wednesday, so they're close in the standings. What separates them is who can still put a full defense pair on the ice.
Puck drop is 7:00 PM CT at Grand Casino Arena. If Spurgeon plays, Minnesota gets its captain back on a thin blue line. If he doesn't, the Blues get a chance to show whether the last 2 games were a real turn or just Ottawa's bad night.