St. Louis Blues Series Statistics: Where Was The Fire?

Not on the ice, that’s for sure.

Sunday’s Game 6 against the Minnesota Wild was one of my least favorite games to watch, ever, and that’s saying something. It looked like regular-season hockey versus playoff hockey, and that spells no good for the team bringing nothing to the party.

St. Louis Blues captain David Backes entirely missed the point when he gave this quote to the media after the game: “We won the division playing a certain way, and we had success playing a certain way. We got away from that too much in the critical times in the playoffs. Now we’ve got to have these… no offense, terrible interviews that I’m sick of doing, quite frankly.”

Good. I’m glad he’s sick of giving exit interviews during the first round of the playoffs. I’m glad he’s pissed off right now.

I’m not happy he thinks that regular-season play is the key to winning the playoffs.

Penguins captain Sidney Crosby hit the nail on the head when he was giving his locker room cleanout interview in Pittsburgh over the weekend. He talked about effort, about the difference in postseason and regular season hockey and about how special teams play is depressed during the playoffs.

Why?

Because playoffs hockey isn’t something you can game, necessarily, and that’s what the Blues are missing. Playoffs hockey is a thousand percent effort, and a heck of a lot of coaching. My complicated feelings on Hitchcock’s coaching aside, the effort simply wasn’t there from our Blues.

Next: Hitchcock Should Have Pulled Allen On Game 5 Powerplay

To dig deeper into that claim, let’s take a look at some possession stats, as well as zone starts and a “luck” statistic to get a broader sense of the story of the end of the St. Louis Blues season. For reference, all stats, unless otherwise indicated, were taken from war-on-ice, which is highly recommended if you want to fool around with stats, graphs, or familiarize yourself with some of the following terms.

The Facts And Figures

After an up-and-down muddle of a first game, the Blues settled down into a depressed manner of play, allowing more shots on goal than was reasonable, giving the puck away too often and taking bad shots through a lot of traffic. Possession wasn’t necessarily the problem: quality possession was.

This last statement is best proven through a review of St. Louis’ score-adjusted Corsi, which measures possession through all shots, be they shots on goal, missed, or blocked shots. It makes sense that you need to possess the puck in order to record a shot, and as we have no other way to measure possession at this time, we make do. Corsi gives us a good idea of how often the puck is held by a player: in this case, one with a blue note on their chest.

Over the regular season, the Blues averaged a Corsi For % of 51.7 over the 2014-15 season, essentially telling us that slightly over half the shots on the ice in any given game are for them, not against them. This leads us to draw the conclusion that the Blues possess the puck a little over 50% of the time they are on the ice, and thus can be considered a positive-possession team.

Believe it or not, that number actually rose during the postseason to 57.1%.

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As we know how most of the games, and indeed the series itself ended, this has the potential to be a confusing stat for some. But if we spend some time looking over simple +/- and shots on goal, it becomes clear that this Corsi percentage indicates that while the Blues might have had the puck and were registering shots in the offensive zone, they were taking bad shots that were easily blocked by opposing Wild players.

To complement this understanding, we turn to St. Louis’ PDO percentage.

You could call PDO a measurement of luck, if you wanted. It would be somewhat vague and I wouldn’t encourage it, but it sure does sound snappy.

PDO is created by adding together a team’s even-strength save percentage and even-strength shot percentage, essentially giving you an idea of if a team or player is in a hot or cold streak; overall, their respective PDOs should average out to about 100. Some, like Sidney Crosby, will have a baseline slightly over 100 because they are an exceptional player. Others will have a baseline slightly under 100 because, well, they’re not. But PDO is, overall, a good measurement of if a team or individual is playing to par.

St. Louis averaged a PDO over the six games of 98.96, with one game dipping as low as to register a PDO of 82.4, one of the lowest they hit all season long.

Graph of PDO vs. Corsi-For / 60 minutes over first five playoff games of 2014-15 season

Only three games crossed the 100 mark — one only by .9% — and unsurprisingly were the only games in which the Blues had a neutral or positive goals-for average. To give you a point of reference, the Penguins, a team over which that there was widespread agreement that simply didn’t have the depth this season to get it done, had a slightly higher average PDO at 99.04, and never dipped below a 95.2 PDO on their worst game of the postseason.

What this tells us is that the St. Louis Blues did not play up to par, and in fact, were significantly sub-par in the postseason, a far cry from what they showed they were capable of in the regular season.

In general, PDO is supposed to average out to a score of approximately 100 over the length of a season. The Blues ended the regular season with a PDO of 100.5, nestled right between Chicago and Anaheim, not bad company to keep for the St. Louis Blues, the perennial younger-sibling to the Chicago club and bristling with the knowledge. To transition from 100.5 to 98.96 is a tremendous drop for St. Louis, putting them in the company of such clubs as Carolina and Columbus, who missed the playoffs by a decided margin.

So, what does the St. Louis club’s PDO tell us? Boiled down to its essentials, we can see that, as Corsi tells us, possession is up, but effort (or luck, if you want) was down. The shots that inflated the Corsi percentage over PDO were not strong chances for the Blues, considering how strong their goaltending was for most of the playoffs.

Finally, we look at the number of offensive versus defensive zone starts for Minnesota and St. Louis over the course of the series.

It shows us a timeline, of sorts, of the trajectory of the games, and whether one team was stuck playing offense or defense the majority of the time. War-on-ice shows a straightforward shift from St. Louis holding the upper hand in their faceoff battles and shift changes to Minnesota improving their stats, game by game.

Moving Average of fraction of offensive zone starts to defensive zone starts over time from

war-on-ice

Over five games the Wild’s defensive zone starts drop dramatically while the Blues’ increase just as dramatically. It stands to reason that there would be an inverse relationship between the two teams but the relative steepness of the two lines show that St. Louis went down hard. This put St. Louis at a disadvantage defensively and not at all coincidentally, aside from Game 4, this resulted in one neutral on-ice goal differential (where neutral is given a value of 0) and three negative on-ice goal differentials over the course of five games.

Essentially, while St. Louis might have been better on puck possession than our eyes gave them credit for, they declined in offensive output over the course of the series while additionally declining in defensive momentum, likely because St. Louis was on defense for a large chunk of the time.

In the same interview quoted and embedded above, Backes went on to say “We didn’t do enough from the first guy, down to the last guy. Now we go to the summer again, too early.” And that, essentially, is the problem. The Blues did not push that on-ice effort; they brought sub-par hockey to the table and were surprised when they lost.

There is guaranteed to be movement this summer based on the Blues performance in the first round of the playoffs. Whether that will be core players, coaches or management remains to be seen. One thing is certain, though: St. Louis never wants to see this kind of playoff hockey again out of its team.

Next: Blues Rumors: Four Coaching Prospects

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