The excellent news for St. Louis Blues fans is that they’re one of the ‘important’ teams as mid-March looms. Only the most die-hard Blues fans out there expected a playoff berth, and the optimists may have thought there’d be a slight, outside chance to wreak some havoc down the stretch.
Instead, the Blues are 10th in the Western Conference, behind only the Vancouver Canucks via a tiebreaker and one point behind the Calgary Flames heading into Wednesday’s slate of games. This puts the Blues well within striking distance of ending their short playoff drought this season. But if they want to get there, they need to make some improvements fast.
The Blues have struggled in so many areas this season, and if those struggles continue from now until mid-April, it’s Game Over until October 2025 rolls around. So, to carve a legit path into the NHL Playoffs, let’s talk about three ‘acts’ the Blues must get together in Act III of this roller coaster of a season.
1 - Special teams
I’m sure fans are so fed up with the Blues special teams at this point. It would be one thing if the power play or just the penalty kill needed work, but both have been unbelievably bad for a team in contention.
Let’s start with the power play, which the Blues converted 19.31 percent of the time. The league average is 21.61 before Wednesday. The average number of power play opportunities sits at 177, and the Blues just have 145 of them.
You would think they’d look to make the most of their 5-on-4 opportunities, but at this point, you’d think they’d ask their opponents to just leave the penalized player on the ice. I say this because, although the Blues haven’t been great with the puck in any situation, they’re converting 8.6 percent of their shots on goal at 5-on-5, 0.5 percent better than the NHL average.
As for the penalty kill, it’s even worse, as the Blues clock in with just a 71.15 PK percentage. And again, it’s not like they’re stuck at 4-on-5 often, with just 156 PK opportunities. The league average is way ahead of the Blues, sitting at 78.39 percent, so yeah, they got a lot of ground to make up in this situation.
2 - Scoring chances at 5-on-5
Team analytics don’t always tell the entire story, but the Blues play at 5-on-5 has been beyond suspect. Here’s a quick rundown:
- 49.3 Corsi For Percentage
- 48.7 Scoring Chances For
- 48.3 High Danger Chances For
And we wonder why the Blues have been so inept with the puck at varying times. They can start by getting out of their own zone more often and taking more shots to create more chances for themselves.
Speaking of shots, the Blues have just 1,748 on goal so far this season through 65 games, 88 under the league average of 1,836 heading into Wednesday night’s slate. This shouldn’t be tough for a team that’s been finding the net more often these days, but with five weeks to go in the season and the playoffs on the line, it must continue.
3 - Team consistency
The Blues have gotten better here overall, but they’re still lacking in this regard. Just recently, we saw the Blues embark on a four-game winning streak, but when you look back at their previous matchups, they never won over two games in a row.
Now, they’ve gone on runs in which they’d taken four out of five, and it’s good enough to call it a consistent five games. And if the Blues took four out of five matchups from now until Game 82, I like their chances to sneak into the playoffs as a wild card, but not without some savvy work from their general manager.
Still, even taking four out of five or six has been a rarity for this team, and it’s often been followed by far more losing than wins. Between November 25th and January 20th, they enjoyed an outstanding 14-9-3 stretch, good for 31 points, but in the next month, January 23rd through February 22nd, they went 2-5-1.
And, of course, throughout the first 22 games of the year that saw Drew Bannister as the bench boss, the Blues were just 9-12-1. So, consistency is a must. And the last thing we need to see from the Blues is for them to falter when the stakes are at their absolute highest.