St. Louis Blues 2017-18 Final Report Card: Patrik Berglund
For the second season in three years, Patrik Berglund was burdened by shoulder injuries. Despite this, he had a decent season, which makes you wonder what he is capable of.
The fact that St. Louis Blues fans are still wondering what the real Patrik Berglund is and can accomplish is quite astounding. He is 29 and just played his 10th NHL season.
You would figure you would have a pinpoint on what to expect. Not so in the case of Berglund.
He gives you just enough to think there is more in there. He disappoints you just enough to figure there is no way he will reach his full potential. Then the juicy middle ground is normally where he falls.
Final Grad: C
If you look at Berglund’s stats as cold, hard numbers, Berglund was disappointing. He had 17 goals and 26 points, which means his assist numbers have continued to go down over the last few years.
However, he gets a pass on cold, hard stats because he played in 57 games due to the aforementioned injury. In actuality, his stats are quite good when considering the limited amount of games.
With 26 points in 57 games, Berglund managed to score a point just about every other game – every 2.19 games to be exact. If you expand that out, he would have been on pace for around 24 goals, which would have been a career high, and 37 points.
Those numbers wouldn’t be jaw dropping, but they would be decent for a full season.
On the plus side, it is good to see Berglund establish himself as more of a scorer. That is one of the big parts of his game that he has struggled with over the years.
The downfall of all this is his assist numbers continue to go down. While Berglund is no longer playing center, you still like your players to have more assists than goals unless you’re just a pure goal scorer like Alex Ovechkin, which Berglund is not.
Berglund has had more goals than assists the last three seasons and four of the last six. Some of this could be due to injury, but it seems to just be part of Berglund’s game.
Nevertheless, when he is on his game, he remains a potent threat for the Blues and would be a fabulous third line scorer if the team had the right amount of depth. The problem is they don’t always have that depth and Berglund has had to go up and down the lineup, like many players. Thus, consistency is hard to come by.
The disappointing part of his game, for a large player, is his lack of physicality. Berglund was credited with 111 hits this season, but he’s not really punishing anyone.
Nobody expects him to be a bruiser, but he should be more menacing. In a league that is getting smaller with the speedsters, he should be able to bully more players, both defensively and in posession of the puck. That just does not seem to happen.
Additionally, Berglund continues to be a minus-player. I fully recognize that you can only judge so much from a stat that takes into accound four or five players at once. However, the fact that Berglund has only been a plus-player four seasons and only solidly on the plus side in two shows that he is not the most dependable defensive player.
Although we praised Berglund’s offense above, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Like so many other Blues, he fails to find any consistency. As pointed out in a column by Jeff Gordon of the Post-Dispatch, Berglund only scored once during a 26 game span and was benched due to lackluster play.
Berglund is not alone in this, but he’s been around long enough to know how to achieve better.
Like much of the team, Berglund falls right in the middle. There is a decent amount of good, but still too much bad and not enough of either to tip the scales either way.
At this point, we have to assume that a C-player is what he is. You’ll get glimpses, but never get the full picture – at least not the one we hoped for. At least he’s popular with the ladies anyway.