The St. Louis Blues got the season restarted last night with a loss. Now, waiting comfy in their homes are another tough team in the Calgary Flames.
The St. Louis Blues got the benefit of a lengthier break over the All-Star event, giving most of their players extra rest and even the ability to stay at home for the four guys that took part. Unfortunately for St. Louis, they were given no favors with the restart to the 2019-20 season.
Right out of the gate for the second half of the season, the Blues had to go through the sometimes rough western Canada road trip. They started off with a tough loss to the Vancouver Canucks.
The Blues ran into a hot goaltender, which almost makes you fearful they wasted some good energy right ahead of another game. The Blues cannot worry about such things.
The Calgary Flames are their next opponent and have no sympathy for the Blues as they are in a fight in their own division. The Flames have been off the entire time and will be chomping at the bit to get things started against the defending Stanley Cup champions.
How They Stack Up
The Blues are in the midst of a three-game losing streak. It does not feel quite as bad when 10 days splits up loss two and loss three, but that’s how many regular season games have been dropped in a row.
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Adding a little salt to the wound, the Blues have been dropping games to teams that are starting to nip at their tails. They lost to Colorado prior to the break and Pacific-leading Vancouver last night.
The Blues are still on top by six points, but only because Colorado was idle. Vancouver has now moved within eight points. St. Louis is now 30-12-8 and lost for the first time in regulation when scoring first.
Calgary comes into their first game out of the break at 26-18-5. The Flames are a puzzling case, however, as they have a minus-12 goal differential, scoring 135 goals and giving up 147. Basically, if the Flames win it is a close game and if they lose, they often get blown out.
Calgary won five in a row to get back into contention, before losing two of three right before the break. Still, that’s six wins out of eight games.
St. Louis has done reasonably well against Calgary the last couple seasons. The Blues won both games against Calgary thus far, winning 5-0 in St. Louis and 3-2 earlier this year in Calgary.
The Blues went 2-1-0 against the Flames last year, so they’ll be hoping to avoid a similar record this year.
St. Louis will possibly look to Oskar Sundqvist and David Perron for offense. Sundqvist has a four-game point streak against the Flames and Perron has points in his last three games against Calgary.
Prediction
Last night did not turn out that well in my prediction. About the only thing I got close on was saying someone would score three goals, but clearly nothing else.
For this game, I see it almost as a pick’em game. There are things going for both sides.
For the Blues, they’ve had their first game and got their legs under them. Players have said they’d rather have a back-to-back instead of every other day, so the Blues will be coming off a good performance even if a loss.
Calgary has been off since January 18 and only scored three goals in their last three games. That might mean they’re well rested, but they were not playing that well prior to the break and that might carry over. Or, they might be even more motivated to turn it around.
Despite that, we saw how motivation does not always translate to results in the Blues game last night. So, with that in mind, I think the Blues get the result.
St. Louis wins 3-1 and get a small measure of “revenge” for the loss taken against Matthew Tkachuk and the Pacific Division in the All-Star game.