Since I was five years old I have been a fan of the St. Louis Blues. You may ask “Why does a kid from Boston decide to not support the most successful sports city in the country?” And that is a perfectly reasonable question. Well, I don’t have a reasonable answer for you. I was four years old playing tee-ball and my team was the St. Louis Cardinals. So I did what any reasonable kid would do, I decided to cut all ties with my home city and state and become a diehard fan of a city that I had never been to or knew existed before this. So now that you have the context of why I like the Blues you now can understand the topic of my blog. I will be diving into one game that the Blues play every week. I will give my pregame predictions and post-game reactions. The game I will be focusing on this week is their Thursday night game in Washington D.C. against the Washington Capitals.
If you have not been paying attention to the NHL at all this year you would not know how the Blues are doing. To put it simply, they suck. Right now their record is 21-19-2 and they are sitting 6th in the Central Division, 12th in the Western Conference, and 25th in the entire league. Not very good. Luckily for us, the capitals are not doing much better with a 21-15-6 record. Both teams have awful Power Play % (PP%), which means if you score a goal on the Power Play, The Blues have a 14% PP% and the Capitals have a 13% PP%. The Blues do have a bit of an advantage in Goals For/Per Game (GF/PG). They have 2.81 GF/PG while the capitals only have 2.33 GF/PG. Looking at the goalies, Jordan Binnington is expected to get the start for the Blues with a 3.04 Goals Allowed Average (GAA). While Charlie Lindgren is supposed to start for the Caps with a 2.24 GAA. My prediction for this game is for the Capitals to win 3-2 in overtime.
Well, that game did not go the way that I wanted it to go. The Capitals won 5-2. The one thing that went well in this game was that T.J. Oshie, a forward on the Caps who was my favorite player when he was on the Blues, scored a hat trick. Besides that, the game was not great. The Blues did get two goals, both from forward Nathan Walker. They were both tips from Walker off shots from the point. The Blues held a pretty good net-front presence in the game which created their scoring opportunities, but we could not capitalize on them. Also, the power play was awful going 0/5. The Blues only had 20 shots on goal and it was a penalty-heavy game with 4 for the Blues.
As we look towards the next week, the Capitals come to St Louis for a rematch on Saturday. Then they visit Calgary on Tuesday and Vancouver on Wednesday.
I like your idea for your passion blog talking about the current Blues. I am from Northern Virginia, so the Capitals are my favorite team. While I do not follow as much hockey as I do other sports, I do keep up with the team. It is interesting how the Capitals and Blues are not doing well when they both won the Stanley Cup recently.
I have always thought hockey was an interesting sport and growing up in Seattle I was never exposed to it until recently, I like how in-depth you went about all the stats of the game. I think it will be interesting to follow the team and see if they improve or not.
Although I have no experience with hockey, the statistics you have access to are very interesting. I am especially intrigued buy the Blues winrate, which I’ll trust you is bad, but is still above 50%, which implies a sort of disastrous spread in team quality that must make for some interesting games. I can also appreciate a game where tiny differences in statistics reflect major swings in the actual game , where the Capitals only have a slightly higher chance of scoring on a power play, but end up scoring five times to the Blues none.