Metrics show it's worse than you think for St. Louis Blues hockey after another loss
The St. Louis Blues have, unfortunately, been dealt a raw hand in November with a tough schedule and a slew of injuries. And their season is going from bad to worse.
The St. Louis Blues have a matinee game tomorrow against the Boston Bruins or today if you happen to be reading this one on Saturday morning. Amidst a four-game losing streak, fans know their favorite team in Gateway City is in a bad spot, but they may not realize how precarious things have become.
Forget the minus-16 goal differential, as it’s the least of this team’s problems, or the fact that their points percentage is a meager 0.441. Those statistics won’t get any better until this team fixes the following issues:
- Before anything else, get healthy. Then…
- Find a way to fix special teams
- Start shooting the puck more
- Start preventing so many shots on goal
- Create more high-danger chances
- Start creating more scoring chances in general
- Stop giving up so many high-danger chances
Quite the checklist, right? So, how did I come up with what are seven issues that this team needs to fix before they can think of winning consistently again? Well, let’s have a look at their overall numbers so you can see just how bad things have gotten in mid-November.
It’s been bad for the St. Louis Blues…really bad…
Yesterday, I stated this team has at least played to overall expectations, but that’s because there really weren’t any expectations. While I’ll concede and say that they’d have probably flipped a couple of those games with Philip Broberg and Robert Thomas on the ice, that laundry list of issues in the above section still wouldn’t look pleasing to the eye.
Yeah, they’d probably look better, but it’s not like injuries have hit every capable skater on this team, so they’re still a decent metric to go by. Anyway, let’s begin with special teams, where the Blues have converted just 14.63 percent of their power play opportunities and killed off 77.08. No, the latter isn’t an awful statistic, but it’s still about 2.5 percent below the NHL average.
As for total shots, the Blues are at 435, while they’ve allowed 518 of them. This has resulted in just a 9.9 shooting percentage and an 0.886 save percentage, both of which are well below the NHL average.
So far, they’ve created just 115 high-danger chances at 5-on-5 and allowed 140 of them. They’re about nine below and 16 above the league average, respectively, in each category. The Blues have created 315 scoring chances overall, 44 below the 359 average. Not to mention, they’ve allowed an eye-popping 401, or 42 more than that 359 average.
As you can see, the numbers have not been in the Blues favor, and it’s a trend you can expect to continue until this team gets healthy again. This, as I projected earlier in the month, could set the Blues up for a long November after all.
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