ST. LOUIS – If you judge Saturday’s St. Louis Blues game based solely on the result, you’ll think the Ottawa Senators game is all over again.
Well, the score is exactly the same, this time an 8-1 drubbing at the hands of the Washington Capitals, a game in which Alex Ovechkin scored twice to move closer to Wayne Gretzky’s goal scoring record with his 862nd and 863rd goals. (31 away from the equalizer), but it didn’t go exactly like the match in the Canadian capital eleven days ago.
For forty minutes I didn’t think the Blues played that badly. Yes, they allowed a first goal within the first minute for the second straight game and the seventh time in a row they allowed the first goal, but as the match went on they had some really good scoring opportunities.
Alexey Toropchenko, Brandon Saad, Brayden Schenn and Zack Bolduc to name a few had some very high-quality, high-danger scoring chances in the match.
They came out of the first game 1-1, thanks to Scott Perunovich’s first NHL goal, and even when they were down 3-1, their second period might have been even better from a scoring opportunity perspective.
They made a few crucial mistakes (Schenn allowed Dylan Strome to beat him without putting a body on him, leading to Ovechkin’s 2-1 goal, and Jordan Kyrou got his pocket picked again in the neutral zone, ultimately leading until Jakob Chychrun’s 3-1 goal).
So you would think that the home team could still come out with some adversity and get into the game. With the amount of good scoring chances they had for forty minutes they could perhaps beat Logan Thompson who was brilliant with some of his saves.
Well, it wasn’t even close to what the Blues needed. Not by a long shot.
It was downright pathetic.
Five goals from the Capitals, who played as if they were the ones chasing the game and pushing the boundaries.
Jordan Binnington was made the sacrificial lamb for poor and sloppy play. The result was a beating on home ice and being booed off the ice. But the boos sounded more like the 18,096 were more stunned by what was happening in that moment than they had been all night.
It fell off the rails quickly and it fell off hard.
“Honestly, I don’t really have an answer for that. It’s completely unacceptable,” Blues defenseman Justin Faulk said. “It’s just not right. I don’t think this should ever happen, a situation like that. We have to have respect for each other, for the game. You can’t just play summer hockey for a while and think That’s good at any time. We are grown men in this league and have to make an effort that is acceptable. It doesn’t go your way every night, but you can’t help it… that’s just unacceptable.”
Almost like the team gave up?
“Yes, it could look like a lot of things,” Faulk said. “There wasn’t a lot of passion, a lot of energy. Sometimes it literally seemed like nothing. I don’t have any words that are acceptable.”
Schenn agreed.
“It comes down to effort,” he said. “We left our goalie hanging out there to dry in the third period and let them score eight goals. You can’t sugarcoat it if you let eight in. It just comes down to being in a hockey game, being able to deal with To come back 3-1, to let five in in the third period, that’s just absolutely unacceptable.”
So for a team lacking superstar talent and dealing with a plethora of injuries, how does effort come back into play? Wasn’t the Ottawa debacle enough of a memory? It should be because it happened so recently (October 29).
Yet here we are again, talking about whether guys make the effort or not.
“It’s easy to sit here and be negative about the situation,” Blues coach Drew Bannister said. “There are many reasons to look back… in the last two weeks we have had two games where it was just unacceptable, the way we play in those situations and find ways to stop the bleeding. We come back with a number of good ones. We have to be able to keep up better hockey. We can’t take one or two steps forward and then keep taking those steps back. Our consistency if we play well, we have to be able to keep that up.”
With 7-8-0 it is clear that this does not happen. And even with Robert Thomas (broken right ankle), Philip Broberg (right knee) and others out of the lineup, there have been games where they have been able to slog through the tough times.
But whatever that was in the third period tonight, it looked like a schoolboy looking for pity.
‘Don’t know. No one else feels sorry for us. I hope not,” Faulk said.
“We enjoyed a period and a half there. We didn’t like the last couple we gave up to make it 3-1. I know we weren’t too happy about that, but it’s a two-goal game, you’re going to doing.” with the third one at home you have the opportunity to apply some pressure and see — they’re back to back — if you can wear them down a little bit and take over for a while and get yourself back in there, but the There was an opportunity to at least make a game of it and we did the exact opposite.”
Let’s look at Washington’s fourth goal, Ovechkin’s power-play goal that made it 4-1 at 2:09.
Watch the Blues pass through the middle of the ice and then scramble into the zone. When the Caps enter the zone, there is no coverage if there is any effort:
The fifth goal was no different:
And the sixth goal seems like a copy of the fourth:
And the seventh, another easy access and no sense of who should do what:
“Guys just have to realize that we as a group have to realize that it’s the National Hockey League, nothing is free in this league,” Faulk said. “You can’t take any night for granted. Other guys want to come here and would love to play in this league. There are guys fighting for a spot every night, there are guys on our team that aren’t in the lineup. I guarantee you that you, they’re sitting there thinking, ‘Why wasn’t I in line tonight when this attempt came through?’ Guys are hungry and you can’t take anything for granted. These two losses in a short period of time are an opportunity for us to look at ourselves and try to figure out what we want to achieve, where we want to be and how we want to do it. grow as a group.”
The Blues say they understand that some of the missing top players (Thomas and Broberg) will not return anytime soon. This schedule doesn’t get any easier. If they don’t figure this out soon, this is going to get ugly very quickly. And I don’t mean that they’re trying to rob their opponents.
The Blues better start winning ugly again, because that is their only chance.
“Yeah, we don’t focus on injuries and when guys will come back,” Schenn said. “We have issues to solve in our room right now with things like this happening. I think we’ll be fine. We just have to come together and really get the guys to believe that if we play the right way, we can be a good hockey team are.” And when we let things slide, our problems pile up. We have to play a difficult game, and when we do it is effective, things like that happen.
“I think guys are buying in. It doesn’t matter who’s buying in and who’s not. It’s a tough game to play every night. We’re not getting out to a lead. We’re not scoring a lot of goals. Then we have to fight our way through.” continue to drive to hockey games. So it all starts with the belief in winning games, 2-1, 3-2, and that is the reality of where we need to be now. I said: we can solve this without any problems. Of course It takes everyone involved to come up with a good response against a good hockey team on Tuesday. Tonight, it’s just unacceptable to let that happen at home.”
And as for figuring it out, it’s going to have to come from coaches AND players. But honestly, some players might as well pull their heads out of their you-know-what.
“We have to solve it as a group,” Bannister said. “It won’t just be the players. It’ll be the coaches and the players together. We’re in this together.”
