The Blues have spent the last two weeks bouncing between extremes, and the numbers tell the story in a hurry. In their past five games, they’ve been blanked twice, managed only a lone late third-period goal in another, and then piled up nine goals across their two wins.
That leaves them with 10 goals over the stretch, or an average of two per game. The bigger issue is how lopsided that production has been: nine of those 10 goals came in the two victories. In the three losses, the offense mostly disappeared, and Pius Suter’s late goal against the Rangers kept a third shutout from becoming a reality in the final seconds.
The power play hasn’t offered much relief, either. At Madison Square Garden, the Blues went 0-for-6, and over the five-game run the man advantage has fallen to 12.5 percent. For a team trying to stay relentless, that kind of special-teams return hasn’t done much to help the win column.
What offense the Blues have found has largely come from two players. Philip Broberg has been logging more than 26 minutes a night, over five minutes more than anyone else on the roster, and he’s produced a goal and three assists in that span.
Robert Thomas has matched that output with four points of his own, while also winning 55.2% of his faceoffs. When those two are rolling, the Blues have looked like a top-10 team in the NHL.
When they’re quiet, the whole operation has looked far less dangerous.
The problem is that the middle of the lineup has gone cold. Mason McTavish, who started the season strong, has been held without a point over the last five games and sits at minus-7.
Dylan Holloway has fired 15 shots without scoring. Connor McMichael has only one assist and is minus-4.
Buchnevich, Berggren, and several others have also struggled to make much of an impact. Right now, the scoring has been coming from the top or not at all.
There have been a few exceptions, including Jimmy Snuggerud and Justin Barron, but the larger pattern is hard to ignore: if Thomas and Broberg aren’t driving the offense, the Blues have had a tough time winning. Even when the shots are there, the rest of the group has too often looked easy to contain.
It’s only a five-game sample, but the NHL doesn’t give teams much room to drift. A stretch like this can shape the standings fast, especially when goals dry up and points slip away.
The Blues have shown they can score in bunches. They’ve also shown, just as clearly, how quickly things stall when their main play drivers get shut down.
Until more of the lineup starts finishing chances, this kind of swingy offense could keep showing up.
In Other News...
Blues Let A Winnable Game Slip Away In One Familiar Area
A chance to extend a promising run slipped away in New York, where the Blues fell 3-1 to the Rangers and missed out on a third straight win. Pius Suter provided St. Louis only goal, and the game had enough moments to suggest the Blues could have gotten more out of it if a few key plays had gone their way.
Instead, the familiar sore spot showed up again. St. Louis went 0-for-6 on the power play, a costly blank in a game where Jordan Hofer did his part with 28 saves on 30 shots, only to be outdone by Rangers goalie Dylan Garand. For a team trying to build momentum, leaving that many chances on the table made the loss feel especially frustrating. [Read more 🡒]
Blues Keep Hitting The Same Wall And Montgomery Knows It
The Blues have spent much of the past three seasons running into the same frustrating checkpoint: the chance to turn a good stretch into a real run, only to come up short when a third straight win is on the line. Even with injuries and roster turnover, St. Louis has generally played solid hockey, but the club still has not found a way to string together the kind of momentum that changes a season.
Jim Montgomery has noticed the pattern, and he knows it is more than just bad timing. The issue, from his view, comes back to a sharper commitment to the teams identity and the edge that has to show up night after night if the Blues are going to break through this wall and start building longer winning streaks. [Read more 🡒]
Blues Fans May Need Patience With Tynan Lawrence After His Fast Start
Tynan Lawrences start in college has been impossible to miss, and it is only adding to the buzz around one of the Blues most intriguing young prospects. The 18-year-old has been productive right away in the NCAA, showing the kind of early offensive touch that can make a teams fan base start thinking ahead faster than the organization probably wants to.
For St. Louis, though, the wiser path may still be patience. The Blues are not in a spot where they need to rush Lawrence into the NHL, and letting him keep building his game in college could be the cleaner development route. Plenty of prospects have been pushed up early and found the jump to be a different kind of challenge, so the real question is not whether Lawrence has talent, but how long the Blues can afford to let that talent marinate before the next decision gets serious. [Read more 🡒]