Weinrich adjusts to new team

Defenseman Eric Weinrich is no stranger to in-season trades. The 37-year-old Gardiner native and former University of Maine All-American will be swapping teams during a season for the fourth time in his 16-year, 1,056-game NHL career when he plays for the St. Louis Blues on Thursday night against the Colorado Avalanche.

Philadelphia traded Weinrich to the defense-depleted Blues on Monday. St. Louis will be his seventh NHL team.

Adapting to a new team during the season is no big deal, according to Weinrich.

“You just have to learn the system real quick and adjust,” said Weinrich Tuesday. “Hockey isn’t a real complicated game. People make it more complicated than it is. As a defenseman, you’re basically there to play defense and then you ad-lib. Most teams all do pretty much the same thing now. Hockey is basically universal.”

The Blues are in a four-way tie for sixth place in the Western Conference and Weinrich will try to help fill the void caused by season-ending injuries to Barret Jackman and perennial All-Star Al MacInnis.

“They want me to step in and play some [significant] minutes. I’ll be ready for anything they ask me to do,” said Weinrich, who has already met with Blues coach Joel Quenneville and general manager Larry Pleau.

Weinrich was fourth on the Flyers in average ice time at 20:48 and will probably earn at least that much with the Blues.

“I’m in as good a shape as I’ve ever been. I think I had been playing pretty much the same as I always have. I don’t feel my game has slipped that much,” said Weinrich, whose contract expires at the end of the season. That will make him an unrestricted free agent.

“I still feel like I could play a couple more seasons,” said Weinrich. “Maybe something will work out with this team. If it doesn’t, I’ll go somewhere else.”

He considers St. Louis to be a great hockey town and said he has been warmly received.

He added that he is indebted to Flyers general manager Bobby Clarke for trading him “to a team with a chance to make the playoffs. He went out of his way to find a good team for me.”

Weinrich and all NHL players may be idle next year if the NHL and the Players Association can’t hammer out a collective bargaining agreement.

“I’m worried about it. I hope it doesn’t happen. But there’s a strong likelihood it will,” said Weinrich. “There has to be concessions from both sides. The owners want a salary cap, but we don’t. Besides cutting salaries, a salary cap would also open up the idea of non-guaranteed contracts.”

As for generating more scoring, which is being discussed by the league’s general managers, he said the best way would be to “make the ice surfaces bigger. That would expose the less-skilled players and give the players with more skill that much more room to operate.

“But you’d wind up losing some prime seating [to create a bigger ice surface] and the owners aren’t going to do that,” said Weinrich.

He saw the movie “Miracle” about the 1980 U.S. Olympic team and said, “I thought it was very good. The only criticism I had is I knew some of the Russian guys were lefthand shots and they made them righthand shots for the movie.”

He said former Maine player Mike Mantenuto, who played the role of Boston University defenseman Jack O’Callahan, “was one of the more visible guys. He was great.”

Larry Mahoney can be reached at 990-8231, 1-800-310-8600 or by email at lmahoney@bangordailynews.net.