There were pretty high hopes in St. Louis for the Blues season. There kind of had to be, given the unrecognizable goo the Cardinals served up this summer. Otherwise, residents might actually have to look around and figure out things to do in St. Louis, and that’s when the true misery starts. While the Blues didn’t make any huge splashes in free agency or via trade, last season’s closing thrust into the playoffs under coach Jim Montgomery had many feeling that the Blues could progress from that into the automatic spots. Jordan Kyrou, Robert. Thomas, Philip Broberg were all entering or in the middle of their primes. They had rehabbed Cam Fowler from his Anaheim-based descent into hell. Jake Neighbours and Jimmy Snuggerud were young players who looked pretty tasty to provide a boost to the offense.
That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really matter what a team has up front, or on defense, or eats in the pregame spread, if the goalies wave their arms uselessly as if they were inflated at a car dealership. That’s where the Blues find themselves, 3-5-1 so far on the young season, dead ass last in the Central, with the second-worst goals-against average at 4.67. They have given up eight (to the Hawks!), seven, and six goals twice in a game. They blew a 4-0 lead to the Red Wings in just 30 minutes.
Jordan Binnington has a .827 save-percentage. Backup Joel Hofer has a .793(!) with a 5.81 GAA. You could put a lab puppy in net and he probably comes close to stopping 79% of the shots he sees. Both are bottom-10 in the league in goals-saved above average (GSAx). Or top-10 in below, as is the case here.
There’s a real ship that the men in the masks are torpedoing, because everything else with the Blues looks pretty good. Their metrics are strong, 12th in Corsi and 6th in expected-goals share. When it comes to chance-creation, the Blues are one of the best around, ranking fourth in expected goals for at 5-on-5. This is a team that should be competitive.
Competitive is pretty hard when they’re looking upon their goalies doing stuff like this.
It should be noted that Binnington has this in his bag. Two seasons ago, he put up an .894 for the season. He wasn’t all that good last year, despite Auston Matthews’s inability to put any of his 73 shots in the 4 Nations Final behind him, with a .900. There is absolutely no guarantee that Binnington finds it. Hofer has been a decent enough back-up, and no one who is actually breathing is going to keep putting up a sub-.800 save-percentage for a whole season. At least one would hope, otherwise they’ll just have to take him out behind the shed.
On the plus side…Adin Hill must be pretty excited about starting at the Olympics at the moment. Or he would be, if he wasn’t broken. Logan Thompson, come on down!
The Blues have a solid structure in place. They have one of the league’s best coaches in Montgomery. But there is nothing a coach can do, no positioning or system he can install, no amount of scoring at the other end, that’s going to cancel out the carnival prize machine in their own crease. It’s the quickest way into the abyss.
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