St. Louis Blues: Who Is The Blues’ Biggest Scapegoat Among Fans

Every fanbase in sports has a player or two whom they cannot stand and point toward for all of the team’s struggles, and St. Louis Blues fans are no exception.

Patrik Berglund held the position of scapegoat for St. Louis Blues fans for a very long time and was often considered as a big reason why the team was unable to find success.

After he was traded to Buffalo last July, the Blues’ fanbase needed someone else to point the finger at. The scapegoat for an organization is usually a player who is either underperforming or overpaid or both.

Looking at the salary situations for a lot of the current Blues players, there are plenty of players that meet the description of being overpaid. Fortunately for fans who practice the art of loving every player on their team, not many Blues underperformed last season.

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Despite a terrible offensive season last year, Jaden Schwartz was exempted from being categorized as the team’s scapegoat. Even when the Blues were struggling, fans held their tongue when it came to criticizing Schwartz.

Early in the season, Jay Bouwmeester fit this description perfectly. An overpaid, aging defenseman who was not having a great year by any standards and was at the forefront of almost all the team’s defensive issues.

It’s hard to pinpoint a fanbase’s most intolerable player a year after they won their first-ever Stanley Cup. However, despite the Blues success, there are still two names that come to mind.

The first name being Alex Steen. Steen matches almost every description of a traditional scapegoat. He is entering his age 35 season and is still under contract for two more years at a cap hit of $5.75 million.

Head coach Craig Berube did something with Steen that prior bench bosses could not do. Berube saw other players outperforming Steen, so he demoted him to the fourth line.

In past years, it had seemed like Mike Yeo and Ken Hitchcock were playing Steen in the top-6 just because of his contract. By breaking this mold, Berube gave fans a new perspective on how to analyze Steen’s play.

Steen will likely never reach the 20-goal mark again in his career. He has achieved that goal four times during his 11-year tenure with the Blues, but because of his age and declining ability, he will likely settle into a fourth or third-line role for the remainder of his career.

Jake Allen is another prime candidate for Blues scapegoat. Much of the early season blame was being placed on the Blues starting goalie for his lack of play.

However, as a longtime Allen apologist, I would claim that his poor numbers were a result of the poor play in front of him. The defense that finished the season was not the same defense that started it, and Allen was caught in a bad situation.

Allen still proved the ability to be a capable goalie by having a stellar record on the road. However, what scares Blues fans and is the center of conversation around the 29-year-old is his contract.

The goalie is owed $4.35 million over the next two years and will be an unrestricted free agent at the same time as Jordan Binnington.

Allen is still a relatively young player and is the same age as captain Alex Pietrangelo, but what a lot of casual fans see is the struggles of the team early in the season, and then those same struggles going away when Binnington took over the starting job.

Maybe I’m wrong, and perhaps the Stanley Cup championship has wiped the slate clean for a lot of Blues fans, and there are no more scapegoats. Though if there are any, Allen and Steen might be at the top of the list.