ST. LOUIS — Seven out of a maximum 10 points made for a pretty good pre-Christmas road trip. But with midseason fast approaching, the Blues know they need to get going and keep going.
“We don’t have much of a choice right now,” defenseman Justin Faulk said, before the team’s 5-4 shootout loss Friday in Las Vegas.
“We put ourselves a little bit behind the 8-ball there. Obviously, we know where we’re at and we know we’ve got some ground to make up. So we’ve got to start trying to find ways to get points and be consistent with it.
“You’re not going to get ‘em every night; it’s just not the way it goes. But you want to come in here after games and know you’ve worked hard and you’ve played our team game. If you do that consistently every night, you’re going to end up getting points the majority of the time.”
So far, in a season of sharp fluctuations — good and bad — the Blues have gotten points exactly half of the time. At 16-16-2, they are five points out of the second wild-card spot in the Western Conference.
After a three-game homestand this week, followed by a four-game road trip to start the new year, the Blues will be at the exact midpoint of the season.
They are 5-10-2 against teams currently in playoff position, and 11-6-0 against teams that currently are not. That disparity alone might tell you the Blues aren’t good enough to make the postseason. Or not good enough to do any damage if they get in.
As Faulk said, you don’t have to win every night. But in order for the Blues to get into postseason range, they have to win about 3 of every 5 games over the remainder of the season. That would get them in the low 90s in terms of final points.
And even that might not be enough. The 2017-18 team, for example, finished with 94 points (44-32-6) and missed the playoffs by one point.
“We’ve got to keep climbing,” captain Ryan O’Reilly said after the Vegas game. “It’s going to be tight and every point matters. That’s frustrating to let this one slip. Not what we want.”
To this point in the season, the Blues are a flawed team. Offensively, they seem to be about one forward short of a formidable lineup. More often than not, when they’ve had a member of their top nine leave the lineup with injury or illness, they sputtered.
The Blues come out of the Christmas break ranked 24th in the league in scoring at 3.03 goal per game. That was good enough to win the Stanley Cup four seasons a goal when the Blues averaged 2.98 goals per game. It’s not good enough now in a faster-paced, high-powered league.
At least the power play has shown signs of life lately with five PPGs in 11 power plays over the past four games. The Blues have moved up to 11th overall in power play efficiency at 23.4%.
The numbers are lousy defensively, but are at least trending in the right direction. The penalty kill ranks 29th at 70.7%, but some tweaks in system and personnel have helped. Over the past seven games, the Blues are at 88.0% efficiency — killing 22 of 25 opposing power plays.
Overall, the Blues had a five-game stretch (4-0-1) in which they yielded only nine goals, but then fell back into some bad defensive habits in a 5-2 loss to Seattle last Tuesday and the 5-4 shootout loss to the Golden Knights.
(You can subtract an empty-net goal allowed against Seattle and the shootout “goal” to decide the Vegas game, but the Blues still allowed four goals otherwise in both games — and that’s too many.)
Prior to the Vegas game, Faulk liked where the team was headed.
“The last few (games), I’d say we started to kind of build, build a game probably more to what we envision our identity to be. A hard, heavy forechecking team that can create turnovers and then just create our offense that way.
“If we try to create offense individually and try to just make plays (that way) all the time — it just feeds into the other team’s game usually.”
Forechecking doesn’t take a lot of skill, but it takes a lot of energy. It’s hard work. In a season filled with inconsistency, if there’s one thing the Blues could fix to make things better it could be forechecking. Consistent forechecking.
“Those are the teams that are at the top of the standings at the end of the year — the ones that can be consistent and that can find their game and end up having success in the playoffs,” Faulk said. “Because they build something and they feel good about their game going into playoffs.
“They’ll be an odd team or two that are inconsistent going in. I would tend to imagine that those teams don’t last very long in the playoffs. So you’ve got to know how your team’s supposed to play. What your identity is, and you’ve got to use the year to build it. And hope you don’t take too long to find it.”
The Blues can picture what their game looks like. They just haven’t played it enough. And the clock is ticking.
Following that four-game road trip to start the new year, the Blues will play 14 of their next 19 at home through the rest of January and all of February. That includes a crucial seven-game homestand in January.
If the Blues don’t have it together by the end of that stretch, it could be a busy March 3. That’s the NHL trade deadline this season.
