The St. Louis Blues met with the Detroit Red Wings last night in the Kraft Hockeyville preseason game on National Television and were thoroughly embarrassed.
I want to lead off first and foremost by saying it’s the preseason and we don’t want to overreact like typical Blue Bleeders, but last night’s game was terrible. It wasn’t just the Blues performance that stunk either.
From the moment they tried to start the game with the traditional National Anthem to the lackluster performance of the Blues, this game smelled bad. I love what Kraft and the NHL are doing for youth hockey and revamping historical hockey venues in small towns around North America.
It’s fantastic for the sport, the kids, and the communities! Can’t ever argue against that kind of work!.What I can’t understand is why weren’t they prepared for the game at game time? The poor gal, I won’t use her name, who sang the national anthem was dead in the water.
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Here she is, about to sing one of the hardest songs for any human to perform, in front of her hometown, in front of national television, and the sound system isn’t working. You could hear another woman telling her,” We’re having issues with the sound system so it may go in and out on you. Just smile and sing.”
What!?!? This poor gal, I know was nervous, and then you tell her that her big moment is already going to go poorly because people may not be able to hear her and she may not be able to hear herself?
I hope they give this gal another shot and do it properly next time. I don’t know if she is any good or not, but I do know she was hung out to dry last night. Speaking of hung out to dry, I bet her and Jordan Binnington were both found in the locker room, together, trying to console each other and build each other back up after he was hung out to dry by the Blues.
Binnington was not the reason we lost. In fact, he was the reason it was only four goals scored by Detroit. Binnington looked great. He moved well, his positioning was great, the battle was there, and he made some dazzling saves, especially in the first period.
The Blues defense was nonexistent. It seemed to me that if you were a Red Wing all you needed to do was move into position for a backdoor play and a goal scoring opportunity was your God-given right! Binner had to stop several of these moving from left to right post and right to left post.
I will say that it’s good to see he’s sharp and reading the play, but the frequency of these plays was unforgivable. The Blues defense was lackluster and had no aggression. I don’t want to mislead anyone here. The Blues only suited up Sammy Blais, Oskar Sundqvist, Ryan O’Reilly, Colton Parayko, Vince Dunn, David Perron, Robert Thomas and Binnington in this game. All are regular starters for the 2019-20 team.
The rest of the line-up is expected to go to San Antonio and after last night’s game will all certainly find themselves there. I hope when they do get there that the coaching staff sits them all down and explains to them exactly what St. Louis Blues Hockey is.
The forecheck was almost nonexistent and when it did start to show up it was brief and usually fudged up by a poor pass allowing Detroit to release the pressure however brief. The PENALTIES!!! Holy Smokes! Now I pray that this is just another showing of stern officiating in the preseason and as the season progresses they will let the players play.
We’ve seen officiating like this before in preseasons prior only to see it loosen up to a degree once the season starts. I’m not saying that any of the penalties were illegitimate. I am only stating that a couple of them may not have been called in season.
Regardless, taking seven penalties in any game is a recipe for disaster. It says to the coaches that you are not ready and need more conditioning. I can almost guarantee that the majority of penalties taken are from a lack of conditioning. They are a direct result of being tired or lazy.
So, Craig Berube, I know you are trying to watch the workloads of the starters, but 12 minutes out of the 14 minutes of penalties were accumulated by our starters. So take the kid gloves off now and get them working.
From the sloppy play to sloppy penalties, this team as a whole did not look ready. They were losing Red Wings in transition all night. Anthony Mantha was allowed to essentially park in an on-ice office and fire shots at Binner at will. Not what we were accustomed to seeing through the second half of last season.
I don’t want to begin overreacting to a preseason game that hosted only a handful of starters for the Blues. I do however want to shed some light and concern on the penalties the regulars are taking so far. Six penalties in any game is atrocious. The loss prior was due to sloppy play and penalties.
Detroit had even more penalties than the Blues so that wasn’t the sole reason the Blues were done in. A continued inability to score on the power play is also a fundamental reason. I won’t go into that so much in this article, because we all know it’s a problem. Hopefully, I don’t have to write it all season long.
We are going to be bringing you report cards after every game this season, and I was intending to start one for this game, but would you believe the “F” key is stuck on my keyboard right now, so the Blues did catch one break for this game.
I’ll wrap it up with this. Preseason and not the team we will see in the regular season, so let’s not panic. Conditioning seems to need to get better in my opinion. Kid gloves gotta come off now for the rostered players. Let’s keep Klim Kostin on the team and put Robert Fabbri on waivers, or cut him altogether. That’s a separate article when that happens. Heard it here first!
Drop the puck!