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

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.