St. Louis Blues: 5 Biggest Turkeys Of 2018-19 So Far

1. Alex Pietrangelo

Pardon my french, but what in the blue hell has happened to Alex Pietrangelo? We talked about severe regression due to injury with Bouwmeester, but this might be the biggest regression I have ever seen overall.

Pietrangelo was literally a leading candidate for the Norris Trophy, for a brief time, in 2017-18. He was providing points and playing solid defense. Then, somewhere along the line, the bottom fell out.

You could start to see the regression last season, though it was not intense. Pietrangelo put up career point totals, so that glossed over the defensive deficiencies.

Even so, the metrics were going the wrong direction. Though it was only by a slight margin, Pietrangelo was below average in both Corsi and Fenwick scores. His defense was lacking too, toward the end of the year. You did not see that reflected because of his high point totals.

Now, in 2018-19, the points are not there and the defensive problems have doubled, or maybe even tripled. A quarter of the season gone, Pietrangelo sits at a minus-7 and also only has 7 points to his name.

Plus/minus might be a skewed statistic, but I can tell you that plenty of the goals that led him to that stat were on him. You can argue about whether it’s all on him or only partially, but Pietrangelo has, flat out, been at fault for plenty of goals against.

He just looks lost out there right now. It is as though someone sucked the soul from him and just left the shell.

Pietrangelo is slow and indecisive. He refuses, or can’t, move his feet and gets caught reaching with his stick, either leading to deflections or penalties. Also, he has become one of the worst offenders of screening his own goaltender. Some nights, it honestly looks like he thinks he is a forward for the other team the way he blocks Allen’s vision.

As bad as it has been defensively, it is just as awful offensively. Pietrangelo can’t hit the side of a barn with a shot or pass at the moment. Against Nashville, with his team’s net empty, he shot wide by a mile and the rebound came out of the zone and led to a goal for the Predators. The only place you could not put that puck is exactly where he put it. That’s how his 2018-19 has gone.

There are calls to strip him of his C, take him off special teams and demote him. None of that is going to happen and even if it did, I’m not sure it would impact this team the way many would hope. The letters are more symbolic at this point and this entire team does not seem to have a leadership group capable of turning the tide.

Fortunately, Thanksgiving comes at the quarter mark of the season. Whether the playoffs remain a possibility is anyone’s guess, but there is still plenty of time for this team to turn it around and, at least, be respectable.

Maybe that is setting the bar low, but as these turkeys show, the bar is almost on the floor. Raising it a bit is only an improvement.