St. Louis Blues report card following an encouraging season
The St. Louis Blues played better than we anticipated down the stretch, meaning their overall report card for the 2023-24 season could receive decent marks.
While they didn’t earn a playoff berth, the St. Louis Blues still took a ninth-place finish in the Western Conference standings and could still be poised to make a run in 2025, but their lineup may need far more work than their overall points total suggests.
When you look at this team’s advanced numbers, you will know what I’m talking about and why they seem to be much further from competing than their overall points total this season may otherwise suggest.
How bad did it get? Let’s take a deep dive and grade just how well this team played in the offensive and defensive zones before we finish up with special teams and finally add an overall pass/fail grade.
The St. Louis Blues struggled in the offensive zone
The Blues may have progressed in points this season, but they regressed in goals scored, dropping from 263 and 16th in the league in 2022-23 to just 239 this past season and 24th place out of 32 teams. This left the Blues to average just 2.91 goals per game, and if you can point to any reason this team missed the playoffs, it was their lack of scoring.
Despite this, St. Louis did have quite a few high-end scorers this season, with five players finding twine 26 times or more. Jordan Kyrou hit the 30-goal mark for the second year running in his age-25 season, and he will be a fixture in St. Louis for quite some time, along with Robert Thomas, who led the team with 86 points.
Jake Neighbours burst onto the scene with 27 scores, while Pavel Buchnevich and Brandon Saad scored 27 and 26, respectively. The sheer number of high-end scorers in St. Louis indicates this team may just need depth scoring in free agency to get a leg up in consistency.
It’s one of those situations where I would give the Blues play in the offensive zone a solid A, but lack of depth scoring brings them to a C-plus. Still, a depth scorer or two shouldn’t cost Doug Armstrong much this summer if he’s willing to bring them in - or perhaps he has a youngster already in the lineup for the job?