Who’s to blame for the Blues’ early struggles?

The St. Louis Blues are off to a very disappointing start to the season, as a 3-0 start has gone down the drain with a seven-game losing streak to sink them to the bottom of the standings.

There’s certainly a plethora of reasons for their early season struggles, but Frank Seravalli and Mike McKenna talked about who is to blame for the slow start for the Blues.

Mike McKenna: “I think it’s largely on the players in St. Louis. I tend to think that there’s an element of this from Doug Armstrong in not retaining David Perron, who was an integral piece of this puzzle in St. Louis, but if it’s just one player, how big is that? Bottom line is that when you watch this thing with the Blues, they have not worked hard, night in and night out.

Now last night against the Bruins was much better. The team actually showed up and now looks like a team that’s just tough to play against. Like, you’re not going to win those games all the time, but at least the Blues were there.

But, they’re getting crushed on the penalty kill, seven goals in their last 12 attempts have ended up being a goal against, and they’re not scoring at all! And so, when you look at it, they have not managed the puck well in the offensive zone, they’re throwing passes all around that ended up going the other direction in odd-man rushes. It’s been a really difficult environment for Jordan Binnington, and I’m sure he’d say that he wants to stop more pucks, we all do as goalies, but I really think it’s been on that forward core.

And yeah, part of that is because they haven’t had Buchnevich and Saad in the lineup all year, Perron’s out, and they’re basically running two lines. They’ve had a tough time putting a full roster of forwards on the ice, last night was the first time you saw pretty much what you’d planned to see from the Blues at the forward position for the rest of the season.”

Frank Seravalli: “So Ryan O’Reilly commented earlier and said his game is “horrible” to start the season. He has one point in 10 games, one goal. What do you see from the captain, and how much do you think this contract situation is affecting him heading into the season?”

Mike McKenna: “I can’t imagine it’s the contract situation, it’s just I’ve seen things from him that you don’t expect. I’ve seen turnovers, throwing pucks around. I’ve seen missed assignments in front. A bad penalty last night in the third period. But I think he’s been weighted down by playing with players that just don’t want to compete harder or haven’t shown that. Jordan Kyrou hasn’t done that this season and they were paired together for a lot of the start of the season.

So I expected O’Reilly to turn it around, I think he’s one of the best two-way players in the game and can drive offensively, it’s just that St. Louis club has been completely out of sync so far.”