St. Louis Blues Are Deceptively Good, Fooling Their Own Fans

The St. Louis Blues are one of the best teams in the NHL according to their record. Sometimes, even for those that follow the team, we can forget how good they have proven to be so far.

St. Louis Blues fans are some of the most loyal you will ever run into. You have to be to continually follow a team that finds new ways to break your heart every spring.

Even through all those heartbreaks, we continually come back year after year, hoping it will be this year. The flip side of that argument is how critical the fans can be.

Like overbearing parents, we analyze and scrutinize every single shift. Sometimes we focus too much on the things that are not happening instead of taking in what is.

In that way, the Blues are actually better than most people think. They are definitely better than the national media gives them credit for. If you don’t play on the coasts or in Chicago, you’re often an afterthought to those people though.

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Even within the Blues community, we can sometimes not see how good the 2017-18 Blues have actually been.

There is an old saying about being too far in the forest to see the trees. It basically means you are so focused and in too deep to actually see what is going on around you.

Even as someone that discusses the team every day and analyzes stats, I was surprised to see where the team measures up. The Blues are actually one of the highest scoring teams in the NHL while allowing some of the fewest goal amounts.

We often focus on the goals the Blues are not scoring. However, of the four division leaders, only Tampa has more goals scored than the Blues do. Only five teams in the entire league have more goals overall.

St. Louis – currently with 104 – has more goals than the vaunted offenses of Chicago, Washington and Pittsburgh.

Conversely, the Blues keep the pucks out at a good clip as well. St. Louis has only allowed 81 goals all season to this point.

That sort of sounds like a lot, but only four teams have done better. Only the Kings have allowed fewer in the Western Conference.

The funny thing is these stats come as somewhat of a surprise to us. When we watch games we notice too much of the shots not being taken and the goals allowed that could have been prevented.

These criticisms are not without merit. The Blues are nothing even resembling a perfect team.

They do need to shoot more and get into those dirty areas. They do need to track their man better and not get flat-footed or puck watch.

Sometimes we need to take a step back and look at things from the grand perspective though. I knew the Blues had a good record overall, but until I took a peek at the standings before writing, I had no idea the Blues had over 100 goals.

None of this is beyond the realm of possibility. It’s not as though it’s the first time the Blues have scored that many goals this early in the season.

It’s just interesting that it flies so far under the radar. We never hear about the Blues being one of the top scoring teams. We rarely hear about them being one of the stingiest defenses.

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Of course plenty will claim media bias. It is far more likely that the media is the same as our own fans. We just don’t realize it’s going on.

The Blues are not overly flashy, though they try to be at times. They are not a dominating, physical team either, so their defense does not intimidate.

All they do is get the job done.

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