The bubble of St. Louis Blues is popped.
After the regular season narrowly ended as the top team of the Western Conference, the defending Stanley Cup champion’s title defense held just six playoff games. The Blues were eliminated in the first round at the hands of the Vancouver Canucks, who grabbed their first win of the postseason series since 2011.
It’s a disappointing finish to the season for St. Louis. Louis and now we are guaranteed that a new team will increase the Stanley Cup in 2020. So, why are the Blues going home this early? Let’s take a look at where things went wrong.
Sloppy play & turnover
Simply put, the Blues never looked really good when they returned to action after the shutdown of COVID-19. They were not the same hard-nosed, tight-knit, disciplined team that we have come to know since Craig Berube took over last season. Instead, they had too many mental lapses and turned the puck around regularly – often times in very dangerous areas.
They did things like this:
Credit goes to Vancouver to complete their chances, but it felt like about three-quarters of the goals they scored in this series came as the immediate result that St. Louis did. Louis just gave her the puck.
Overall, it was just a very embarrassing performance from a Blues team that we all know could do much better. They were consistently outplayed and outworked by argumentative and inferior team that was more than ready to feed their lunch.
Lack of discipline
When the sloffiness of the Blues does not immediately translate into a Vancouver goal, it often translates into a Vancouver play … which then quickly translates into a Vancouver goal. St. Louis, who finished the regular season as the fourth-worst penalty team in the league, put the Canucks on the power play 23 times over the course of the series. Considering Vancouver had a top five power play in the league this season, the results were bad for the Blues.
Again, the Canucks did well to take advantage of the opportunities that were given to them. They scored seven times on the man advantage, with most of that damage coming from their very dangerous top PP unit with Elias Pettersson, Brock Boeser, Bo Horvat, Quinn Hughes and JT Miller.
By coming this series, I expected a relatively inexperienced (and often undisciplined) Canucks team would be the side that made too many mistakes and made too many expensive penalties. In fact, it was the opposite.
Coaching
We have seen it so many times in the past. The Blues are a much different (and much more dangerous) team than Ryan O’Reilly is at his best. At the forefront of this series, O’Leilly’s line was dominant in terms of controlling possession and limiting the chances for the top league where it matched.
Eventually, that dominance helped St. Louis found wins in games 3 and 4. In the Blues’ Game 3 win, O’Reilly’s line-up controlled an absolutely hefty 80 percent of shots (24-6) and attempts (39-10) at five-of-five. They also scored twice, including the winner of the overtime. In Game 4, O’Reilly’s line controlled 67 percent of the attempts, 71 percent of the shots and scored once while excluding the opposition.
But Travis Green did well to find spots for his top players (namely Elias Pettersson) away from O’Reilly at five on five and the paid dividend. And Green’s willingness and ability to juggle his forward line eventually helped stop the bleeding and put Vancouver back on track in games 5 and 6. Jake Virtanen’s selective (and somewhat surprising) commitment worked to help Vancouver get a little heavier. and injected a bit of juice in front of the Canucks lineup over the last few games.
It can not be overstated how important it is for coaches to make adjustments over the course of a best-of-7 series, and Green did a fantastic job of responding to what he saw and turning things around. ‘the Blues’ gameplan.
Goaltending
It’s hard to put a ton of blame on goaltending, considering the bad Blues who did not play for their own, but those mistakes and turnover are only increased if your goalkeeper does not save stoppable pucks. There’s no way around it, Jordan Binnington looked like a shell of the man we saw last postseason.
Binnington lost all three of his starts and went 52 for 65 on shots faced, giving him a reasonable .800 saving percentage in those three games.
St. Louis understandably went to Jake Allen, who helped the ship directly in games 3 and 4. He went 92-for-100 in the series, but had his nice moments as well.
Overall, goaltending was not the biggest issue for St. Louis. Louis, but it certainly did her no favors either.
No secondary score
One of the strengths of the Blues last year was their ability to roll four lines and make important contributions (at both ends of the ice) from top to bottom. That kind of depth is often the difference for teams trying to make deep playoff runs.
Saint Louis did not make exactly these contributions this time. If you look at the production they got in this series, it almost all lies at the top of their lineup. O’Reilly, Jaden Schwartz, Brayden Schenn and David Perron stood for almost all of their scores on equal strength. Only one goal came from a forward outside the top six (Sammy Blais).
It also does not help that the Blues, who scored more goals from defenders than any other team in the regular season, had only one five-on-five goal from a defender (Justin Faulk) in this series. The Vancouver bottom six wiped the floor with the Blues’ over these six games, and that’s what few are likely to see coming.
