Jaroslav Spacek’s injury to his left shoulder will keep the Blackhawks’ best player in the plus/minus category out of the lineup Wednesday night when they try to stretch their undefeated string to five games against his former team, the Florida Panthers.
Spacek sustained the injury to his rotator cuff when he was checked into the boards in the first period of Sunday’s 2-2 tie with Colorado. X-rays taken that night were negative. After an MRI examination Monday, the defenseman didn’t practice Tuesday while awaiting the result of the exam.
“For sure, he won’t play,” coach Alpo Suhonen said.
While the injury isn’t believed to be serious, Suhonen is wary because of an earlier injury situation involving defenseman Alexander Karpovtsev. In Karpovtsev’s case, what originally was diagnosed as a bruised right knee turned out to be damaged cartilage that required arthroscopic surgery. He returned last week after missing 11 games.
“We thought Karpovtsev would be playing quickly but it took four weeks,” Suhonen said.
A similar scenario involving Spacek would weaken the Hawks’ defense and put a crimp in the offense. He contributed two goals and an assist to last week’s three victories, giving him four goals and 12 assists since arriving in the Nov. 6 trade that sent defenseman Anders Eriksson to the Panthers.
Spacek’s creative style was ill-suited to the dump-the-puck philosophy of then-Florida coach Terry Murray, who was fired in late December. In 12 games with the Panthers, he had two goals and one assist and was a minus-4, a sharp contrast to his plus-16 rating in his 30 games with the Hawks.
Replacing Spacek will be Kevin Dean, a fixture in the lineup for the first three months of the season. Dean has been a healthy scratch for the last six games, missing some of them because of the hospitalization of his infant son, K.C., who had a viral infection.
Hawk All-Star: Tony Amonte, the Hawks’ captain and top goal-scorer with 23, has been named to the North America All-Star team’s roster for the Feb. 4 game with the World All-Star team. This will be the fifth straight year Amonte has been selected to compete in the NHL’s All-Star Game.
Some players would prefer taking a mini-vacation during the All-Star break rather than competing in the game, but not Amonte.
“You only have an opportunity to play for so long and it’s always an honor to go,” he said. “It’s always fun to sit around the locker room. You feel privileged to be playing with them.”
The roster for the World All-Star team composed of players from Europe will be finalized Wednesday.
New kind of coach: The Hawks have hired a “developmental coach,” Zinetula Bilyaletdinov from Russia. Bilyaletdinov, who is nicknamed “Coach Bill,” played 12 seasons for the National Team in the former Soviet Union. After retiring as a Moscow Dynamo player, he became the team’s assistant coach for five years and then spent three seasons as head coach.
Bilyaletdinov left Russia to become an assistant coach for the Winnipeg Jets (now the Phoenix Coyotes) in 1993-94 and worked for that franchise for four seasons.
“This is something we had planned to do next summer,” said GM Mike Smith. “We were able to speed up our plan when Bill became available now.”
