St. Louis Blues: Why Game 2 Is Scary

Unless you had to work, have a spouse that doesn’t care for hockey and made you watch some television show or your child had something going on, you already know how Game 2 for the St. Louis Blues panned out. Unfortunately, the game could have lasting ramifications.

If you did miss the game last night, you can check out our initial thoughts and recap here. For the rest of us, let’s take one last look back before we attempt to erase that from our minds.

The St. Louis Blues came out and for the first 90 seconds to two minutes, they looked ok. They had a decent jump in their step and Vladimir Tarasenko came close to scoring the opening goal of the game.

You wonder how things might have changed if Tarasenko had taken that extra millisecond, made one more move and scored. You wonder how things could have shaken out if Brian Elliott had not allowed a soft goal for the Sharks’ first score of the game.

I’m a somewhat of a believer in the butterfly effect. You can’t change one or two things and think everything else plays out the same.

So perhaps the Blues score first again and the Sharks are the team gripping their sticks too tightly. Maybe the Blues take that momentum and the palpable energy from the crowd and springboard themselves to a 2-0 series lead.

Instead, the complete opposite happened. The Blues, who had proven themselves more than capable of coming back from almost every instance and all adversity, actually seemed to bow their heads and realize they were done after only two minutes and change into Game 2.

After all those games and the proclamations that these weren’t the same old Blues, we got those Blues instead of what we thought the current team was.

The team that would shrink from the occasion instead of rise to it. The team that had no answer for anything their opponent did. It was a shock to the system to the point where you couldn’t even get mad anymore. You knew there would be no push back, so using energy to be upset would be a fruitless effort.

The scary thing, outside of the Blues play in Game 2, is how the Sharks played. They didn’t dazzle with crazy stick dangles. They didn’t wow you with breakaway speed. They just did all the little things right.

They took away every single thing the Blues wanted to do. What was frightening about it is, even if the Blues had shown up to play, it might not have mattered. The Sharks had a plan, seeming to know every little turn the Blues were going to make, every thought that entered their head and knew how to counteract it.

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So, what it boils down to, as we pointed out yesterday, the Blues were bad and the Sharks were good. The thing that is irritating is you can’t tell whether that’s how it’s going to be for the rest of the series or just a blip.

The Blues were bad enough and the Sharks good enough that fans can envision scenarios where the series is literally over. The Sharks keep playing as well as they did, the Blues either can’t match it or it doesn’t matter since San Jose shut them down pretty well and the Sharks win the next three.

Or the Blues could win the next game and everything gets turned on its head. The problem is, you just can’t tell based on the Blues’ inconsistency.

Even Jeremy Roenick has picked up on the Blues’ ups and downs. He made a statement after Game 2 wondering why a team this good shows up for one or two games and then disappears, plays well for three games and disappears, etc.

It’s understandable to maybe be a step slower or be fatigued. The style the Blues play when they’re on is very draining, mentally and physically.

Even given that though, the way in which the entire team plays when they aren’t on is too much for anyone to take. There just cannot be that big of a dropoff from how well this team can play to how bad they can be.

Maybe it’s just a fan’s worry. Maybe the Blues will come back and prove us wrong in the very next game.

The worrying thing is the Blues are playing with fire. They aren’t taking advantage of home ice, they aren’t showing up to games where they can put their boot on the opponent’s throat, they aren’t showing enough resistance when they do have a bad game and add to all that the Sharks looking so well and it’s not a positive picture.

If we go introspective, I don’t think it’s done. I think the Blues are going to take one game on the coast. For the first time all playoffs though, I’m actually worried.

In the previous rounds, you could see enough in the Blues’ game to give you hope. Not quite that way in this series. In previous bad games, you still had the sense the Blues were on the verge of breaking out. Not in Game 2.

Next: Blues Keys to Beating the Sharks

As mentioned, once the Sharks scored, it actually seemed like the players knew the game was over and were just trying to get out of the building.

The Blues have plenty of questions to answer now. Can they rebound? Can they answer what the Sharks are doing? Were we wrong to think that the Blues playing at their best are better and will we even see the Blues at their best?

Time will tell how this all plays out. For this fan, I’m afraid for the first time this postseason.