I’m guilty of this as much as anyone that looks at the peaks and valleys of a franchise in any sport with a salary cap. We simplify it too much by not taking into account aberrations in either a bad or good way. We just figure that a team has a few years to progress before they make it to the top of the league and then have a few years of regression before hitting the bottom, then starting the cycle all over again.
The St. Louis Blues seemed to progressing through their years of maturity as they were on the road to being a top team in the NHL. However, the Blues hit a bump in the road by having not improving on their 2009-2010 campaign. Can new head coach Davis Payne get the most out of his players now that he’s the head coach and has lost the interim tag?
He’ll have to try and get the young core of this team back on track again after there was so much promise for the individual players. Guys like TJ Oshie, David Backes, David Perron and Brad Boyes have to pick their games up to propel this team from a team full of promise to a team that is playoff-bound. The Blues cannot afford to have Andy McDonald as their leading scorer with only 57 points. That’s simply not good enough to be a playoff team.
Defensively, the Blues have a lot of guys that were full of promise and had big expectations coming out of junior, but at some point, these young guys are going to have to show the maturity and growth in their game in order to elevate the Blues to be a playoff team. Eric Brewer and Barrett Jackman are solid vets that aren’t game-changers, but won’t do anything to cost them a game either, but they need more from Erik Johnson, Carlo Colaiacovo and Alex Pietrangelo.
But the big news of the off-season involving this team comes with the arrival of Jaroslav Halak from the Montreal Canadiens. Everyone knows about his magical run during the playoffs last season, but with that run comes expectations that he can elevate this team in a way that Chris Mason couldn’t.
Halak represents one of the two players to look out for in camp alongside Patrick Berglund. The question is obvious for Halak. Can he duplicate that magic from the playoffs and stretch it out for an 82 game season? It’s one thing to be lights-out for a couple of months, but doing it for a full season is another story.
Berglund was left out intentionally from the young guys that have not lived up to expectations because he has had the worst struggles out of all of the young guys. With only 26 points in 71 games last season, that would usually be enough to be sent packing to the minors. However, with how young this team is, Berglund may still be counted on to not only produce for the club, but to play Top 6 minutes.