The St. Louis Blues have not been able to win the special teams battle for a while now, and it is seriously hindering this team's chances of getting positive results. To put into perspective just how bad their power play units have been, going back to December 7 against Montreal, which was the first of two straight games of having power play goals, the Blues have scored five times with the man-advantage.
They also had 42 chances during that time period, giving them a power-play percentage of 11.9%. In regard to the rest of the NHL during that time, the Blues have the 23rd-ranked power play. Even more notably, this recent shutdown has now reached no goals in their last 17 attempts with an extra skater on.
Why can't the Blues take advantage of this? Is there any fixing it?
Man-advantage is a disadvantage
Blues head coach Jim Montgomery has given a couple of different looks and formations to the two power play units. Justin Faulk and Cam Fowler have switched between the two units as the Quarterbacks on the blueline. Philip Broberg has also gotten some time, which is not a usual thing for him.
For a while, the Jimmy Snuggerud and Dalibor Dvorsky one-timer tandem was working flawlessly, but now, both players are kind of just hanging around the face-off circles without much chance of getting a feed through to them. With the injury to Nick Bjugstad and Pius Suter, the bumper spot in the slot has been rendered useless unless Pavel Buchnevich is in that spot.
It has been unorganized and sloppy during a time in the game in which the Blues have to be at their best.
Powerplay rank continues to plummet, coinciding with playoff chances
The Blues have the 26th overall power-play percentage, with a conversion rate of 15.97%. That is just above Utah, in fact, and right behind the struggling Toronto Maple Leafs. But, when you couple that with just 19 goals with the man-advantage, which is ranked 29th, and then a penalty kill percentage of 76.27%, which is ranked 28th, things are not great for the special teams.
Having a bad power play and a worse penalty kill is not going to help you win hockey games. Those two areas of the game are so important, and the Blues are not doing themselves any favors by being horrific in both. You can directly correlate these last couple of losses due to losing the special teams battle, like the 7-3 loss to Chicago on Wednesday. The Blues were 0-5 on the power play, and then let up three goals on the penalty kill. Big swing there.