3 Reasons The St. Louis Blues Will Win The 2022 Stanley Cup

Tarasenko

One man will not often win you the Stanley Cup, especially a forward. Goaltenders have the biggest impact, but even then you need help.

Still, the resurgence of Vladimir Tarasenko gives the Blues that extra jolt toward a championship. St. Louis has the weapons, but when your superstar is a superstar again, it’s that little added boost to your offense.

Tarasenko is back in 2022 – to borrow a phrase from Nic Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, “not that he went anywhere.”

We forget how consistent Tarasenko is and has been. His two injury riddled seasons tainted the perception.

When healthy, Tarasenko has scored 30-plus goals every season except his rookie and sophomore season. He only played 38 games that first year and still got 21 goals in 64 games the following year.

It’s been 30-plus all the full years after that. There was a 40-goal year mixed in just to get our hopes up too.

Not only has Tarasenko regained the scoring touch, but he got even better overall. He set a career high for points and assists.

He proved to be clutch, scoring nine game-winning goals. That’s also a new career best, beating the previous mark by four goals.

Regardless of what the naysayers on social media say, he’s been a more physical player. Tarasenko had 83 regular season hits in 2021-22. The last time he had over 80 hits in a season – the 2018-19 season. St. Louis won something pretty important that year.

What’s more impressive about Tarasenko’s stats are that he’s averaging the third lowest minutes per game in his career. That means he has actually been more productive per minute than other years.

Depth

Springboarding off the Tarasenko part, another big reason the Blues can and will win the Stanley Cup is their depth. This team rolls all four lines and has interchangeable parts, even at the bottom, that the coach is fine using.

While every fan has their guy they love to pick on and most of those players have given us good reason, the reality is that this team doesn’t have bad players. They’re inconsistent and a tad lazy at times, but they get the job done.

Defense is this team’s biggest weakness, but we considered team defense a huge reason the Blues won in 2019. That team allowed 223 regular season goals and this team allowed 235. Eight goals isn’t as huge a difference as we think.

As bad as we made the defense out to be, they finished 10th in goals against out of 32 teams. That’s still the top third.

Offensively, this team is amazing. The 2019 Blues scored 247 goals, which put them 15th out of 31 teams. This year’s squad had 307 goals, which was 4th in the league. For comparison, Colorado had 311.

St. Louis has nine guys that scored 20 goals or more. They had two players that score more than 30 goals.

Justin Faulk was only four goals shy of 20. That was pretty close to 10 players with 20-plus goals.

Think of all the combinations we have seen this year. Robert Thomas has elevated everyone.

He’s been with Tarasenko, Jordan Kyrou, Pavel Buchnevich, Ivan Barbashev, Brandon Saad – basically everyone on the team that is not a center.

Kyrou had 74 points. 74 points and he could have been better, and will need to be better in the playoffs, but that’s still amazing.

Nathan Walker came within whiskers of scoring 10 goals. You now have the freedom of picking between Tyler Bozak, Logan Brown or Dakota Joshua as your fourth line center.

Defensively, the Blues brought Nick Leddy in to pair with Colton Parayko. However, Marco Scandella has found himself again, often putting Leddy with Faulk now.

Ultimately, the Blues can mix and match and not feel cornered by any certain combinations. They’re not dependent on one line for scoring or one defensive pair. Perhaps they don’t have that shutdown pair like in 2019, but you can still figure out what pair makes the most sense against which opponent.

The beauty of hockey is that depth can overcome star power.  In football, if you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterback, but in hockey if you can roll out four, consistent lines, you’re going to win and the Blues have that again.

Deja Vu

Let’s get this out of the way. The 2021-22 Blues are not the 2018-19 Blues.

They’re better offensively, not as good defensively and aren’t as big, nor as physically punishing as that team proved to be. However, the thing people forget is that nobody thought that about the 2019 playoff team.

Based only on the regular season, we knew the Blues were a bigger squad and liked to forecheck, but nobody saw the physical punishment that wore out Winnipeg and San Jose coming. The way they threw themselves into the opponents while still keeping themselves involved in the play was amazing, but unexpected.

That’s where the deja vu comes in. This current team is built differently, but it has so many similar qualities.

They’re capable of winning in any way. This team is based on offense more than any other Blues team since the early 1990’s, but they’re still capable of winning low scoring games.

The goaltending can still steal them games. Talk about Ville Husso‘s inexperience or Jordan Binnington‘s shaky play all you want. Either of those two has the talent and the ability to steal the Blues games, which you need in the playoffs.

Sticking with goaltending, it should be a familiar theme that the Blues have questions going into the playoffs with goaltending. Local fans were confident in Binnington back in 2019, but, nationally, he was an unknown quantity. Fans and media outside of St. Louis didn’t buy into the whole “Do I look nervous?” thing. Now, we hear the same questions about Husso – whether he can handle four, seven game series.

Similarly, nobody really expects the Blues to do much in 2022 and nobody expected them to do anything in 2019. Most analysts said the Winnipeg Jets would win in five or six. It’s more a split this time around, but there are still plenty picking against the Blues against Minnesota too.

You can bet nobody will give the Blues a chance if they face the Colorado Avalanche in a potential second round. Even if they made the conference final or the Stanley Cup final, the prognosticators are fawning over the Eastern Conference this year.

Good. Let them overlook the Blues the way they did in 2019. This is not the same squad, but that can and will fuel them as long as they’re playing to their best abilities.

Looking at individuals, there are plenty of doubters. Scandella is on most people’s you-know-what list, but nobody had much confidence in Carl Gunnarsson in 2019. Nobody thought Jay Bouwmeester and Parayko could shut anyone down and they did. Nobody saw the fourth line of the 2019 Blues being so immensely effective, but they were and the 2022 version can do the same, even if in a different way.

They’ve had plenty of ups and downs, but like in 2019, this team believes in themselves and each other. Whether they like one another off the ice is irrelevant because we’ve seen a bond between a guy like Tarasenko, who everyone claimed to be a cancer, and all his teammates, even ones we know have had a rift in the past.

There may not have been a midseason practice fight, but this team went through similar trials to the 2019 team. They had a stretch where they weren’t playing well and fingers started getting pointed, even if names were left out.

The 2022 Blues persevered and had a record-breaking winning and point streak to end the season. Oh, by the way, the 2019 Blues won nine of their last 12 and took points in 10 of their last 12 games.

Purely coincidence, for sure. Nevertheless, when this team gets hot, they’re capable of beating anyone.