At the end of the 2014-2015 season when Ken Hitchcock signed yet another year-long agreement for the Head Coach position with the St. Louis Blues, he pointed to the Blues’ speed as their main flaw, the fly in the ointment, the reason why they hadn’t blown Minnesota out of the water in four games instead of falling limply to them in six.
Here, we’ll pull that interview up again. Watch it. Watch the sincerity on his face as he talks footspeed, as he talks about how all the teams left in the playoffs had one thing the Blues didn’t have on their side: speed. And who won the Cup? Chicago, who is known to be one of the speediest teams in the league.
So, Hitch says they’re going to get faster. It’s doable, we think — trade for a few faster guys, work speed in practice, and you’ll be okay, right? We believed him. Because why not? We want to have faith in our team and our coaches, we want to see them succeed, and most of all, we do kind of want to see footspeed improve on the Blues. It really couldn’t hurt.
During Jeremy Rutherford’s St. Louis Blues Q&A Thursday, a concerned citizen posed the question to Rutherford (no, we didn’t plant them) as to whether or not the Blues had actually gotten faster. Unsurprisingly, but disappointingly, Rutherford, ever the voice of reason, didn’t think they had.
And we have to agree. I’ve highlighted the pertinent parts for ease and clarity of reading below.
"JR, at the end of the season, we heard Management/Coaching (finally) recognize that speed wins in the playoffs, yet the acquisitions and moves they’ve made indicate they’re in for another “black n blue” style season. Will they ever learn? – MDB04I can’t answer that. I know what the Blues’ answer is, or at least I know what Hitch said in the article earlier this week: That Lindbohm and Bortuzzo give the Blues some “reckless” attributes and that will help the team play faster. Yes, but how many minutes are they playing? How does that make the Blues a faster team … we’re talking about a third defensive pairing. Hitch, and I’m not criticizing, I’m just analyzing his comments, said that the Blues can’t sign six fast skaters, you have to develop them. He mentioned Fabbri and Rattie as examples. But if they’re not in the lineup, how does that make the Blues faster? I don’t think the Blues are going to be this big, slow bruising team that many are talking about. They still have plenty of skill, and you need some big bodies to compete in the West. But I do not see how they are the least bit faster, which is an area I think needed improvement. – jrutherford"
Rutherford says what we’ve all been suspecting: there have been no moves by management to back up Hitchcock’s speed plan.
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Jettisoning Jackman helped a bit, but sending away Oshie probably negated whatever good they did in terms of upping overall team speed.
Coaching staff can stress speed in practice and in training camp all they want: when you set out to build a sturdy team and don’t care so much about speed, caring about how fast they are retroactively doesn’t necessarily do you a whole lot of good. The Blues are not a fast team (though they’re not slow, either) and they can certainly hone their speed, but won’t magically become fast overnight, not without a player overhaul.
Case in point: Vladimir Tarasenko. Known for being the Blues’ breakout star, and with mitts of gold and silver, or some sort of alien metal we haven’t discovered yet but will value greatly. He’ll roll through your line neatly, figuring out ways around opposing players, but he’s not a speedy kid, and he never will be.
The Blues signed Tarasenko for approximately the rest of his productive NHL years, and there’s no way to speed him up a whole lot. If they were committed to the Faster plan for the upcoming season, they needed to take this summer to pick up two or three speedsters, not wait for Rattie or Fabbri to break through to the NHL level.
Essentially, this tells us that if management is behind Hitch’s New Direction, they’re still playing the long game.
It’s smart – don’t jump horses midstream. So far the Blues have done a great job in the regular season, and only finding the postseason performance to be lacking. Tweaking things here and there is acceptable, but completely abandoning one tack for another is not.
There have been too many examples in the past few years of teams that changed direction too abruptly and lost control of their rebuild.
While Armstrong and co. might switch horses once they reach that riverbank, at the moment, slow and steady is the way to go, even if it won’t win the race.
But, no. The St. Louis Blues have not gotten faster.
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