St. Louis Blues: 3 storylines to watch this season
The Most Improved Contender?
No one gets an award for being the NHL's 'most improved contender.' The key isn't to be improved on paper in the offseason, it's to translate that improvement in late-April, May and June. The Blues have been the league's most improved contender in the recent past, it's never meant anything when the chips were down before.
Could that change this year? Only the hockey gods know for sure, but we can tell you with a good deal of certainty that the Blues are the NHL's most improved contender going into the 2014-15 NHL season.
Though the supposed virtue of parity in the NHL is regularly touted by the league and media and fans, at the moment, there are really only five or six bona fide Stanley Cup contenders. There's the upper tier, which includes the Chicago Blackhawks and the Los Angeles Kings. Then there's the next tier, which includes the Blues, the Boston Bruins and the San Jose Sharks (What? Stop laughing!).
Of those clubs, the Blues are the only team that improved themselves in any significant way. The Kings lost a top-four defender in Willie Mitchell, the Blackhawks swapped out an aging center with some defensive value (Michal Handzus) for an aging center with some offensive value (Brad Richards), the Sharks added a whole whack of sub-NHL quality depth forwards with fighting ability for some reason and Boston spent the summer in salary-cap jail.
Meanwhile, the Blues signed prized free agent Paul Stastny, a credible top-line forward who plays a premium position and plays it very well. Stastny is a hugely underrated two-way forward, the type of player reliable enough in his own end to set the table and skilled enough to feast. Riding shotgun with David Backes, Stastny gives the Blues one of the league's most potent 1-2 punches at center.
Throw Patrik Berglund and Maxim Lapierre into the mix and it becomes clear that if there's one team that can legitimately matchup with the Kings in the center of the ice, it's probably St. Louis.
The Goalies
Brian Elliott will enter this season as the No. 1 goaltender for the Blues. It's quite the twist in net for St. Louis, and for Elliott. It's unlikely that many observers expected him to vanquish and outlast better goaltenders like Jaroslav Halak and Ryan Miller and earn the right to start regularly behind Ken Hitchcock's suffocating, goalie-friendly defensive system.
Elliott is probably better suited to platoon duty than to being a workhorse, No. 1 starter at this point in his career and the Blues are probably aware of that. Which is why promising young netminder Jake Allen is going to get a significant opportunity in his first full NHL season.
Allen, 24, excelled with the Chicago Wolves of the American Hockey League last season and is surely ready for prime time with St. Louis. Actually it's possible that he'll be ready for even more than just backing up Elliott, which is a plot that could get thick as the season rolls along.
The Offense (or lack thereof)
The St. Louis Blues play low-event, restrained, extraordinarily disciplined Hitchcock-style hockey. This is a team instructed to dump the puck in and make the safe play on 2-on-2s occasionally!
While that defensive style of hockey works in the regular season, it hasn't worked against the league's elite in the Stanley Cup playoffs in recent years.
The Blues are too reliant on pinpoint accuracy and fortunate bounces to produce offense. With weapons like Jaden Schwartz, Alexander Steen and Vladimir Tarasenko, they're probably an above average shooting team.
Building an offense around the percentages leaves you little margin for error though, and the bottom has fallen out on the Blues in the postseason consistently in recent years. If they can't figure out how to generate more shot volume, it'll probably be a similar story this spring.