“I think this series has the highest sweep potential in the 1st round, sorry Blues fans.” —May 15th, 2021
Yeah, I was right. The Blues just looked defeated from the get-go. Let’s go game by game and try to understand what happened to the 2019 Stanley Cup Champions.
Game 1 was St. Louis’ best chance to win. Binnington looked like himself from the 2019 playoffs, and the Blues wasted their opportunity. He saved 46 of 49 in the game, and all the Blues could do is get 23 shots. The Blues Penalty Kill didn’t look very good, but both of the teams were fairly disciplined. A 4–1 final in favour of Colorado, and they took control of the series early.
Game 2 was where Nazem Kadri went back to his old self. He decided to nail Justin Faulk in the head, taking him out of the series completely. He got an 8 game suspension for this, and I’m honestly surprised it wasn’t more. Binnington didn’t play badly, but he wasn’t the world-beater that he was in game 1. The Penalty Kill was once again terrible. Colorado went 2–2 on the Powerplay, and that ended up making a huge difference. As the first game of the series, it was very disciplined besides the Kadri hit. What Kadri did almost cost Colorado the game, but after two empty netters, the Avs took game two by a score of 6–3.
Here is where the Blues looked like they were done. Even though these teams went back to St. Louis for game 3, they looked so deflated. Although they did much better on the penalty kill, holding the Avs to 0–4, they just didn’t have it. Despite outshooting the Avs 32–26, Colorado took advantage of some shaking defending. Grubauer played a great game, and it led to a 5–1 Colorado win with the help of an empty netter.
By the end of game 3, you would’ve guessed that St. Louis was going to lie down and die for game 4, but they put up a solid effort. The problem in this game was once again, St. Louis’ penalty kill. Colorado went 3–3 in this one, to be fair two of them were empty netters, but it was from something that I think cost the Blues the game. With less than 2 minutes left and it being a one-goal game, Mike Hoffman took a very dumb double-minor high sticking penalty on Nathan MacKinnon, and that killed the Blues' momentum. With the final score being 5–2 for the Avalanche, the St. Louis Blues were the first team eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Let’s look a bit more at what happened here, and talk about why the Avalanche will be so dangerous for whatever team they face next.
I mean, how else can you bring up the Avalanche. I couldn’t fit Rantanen on the traffic, but he also had an amazing series. The top line of the Avalanche had 24 Points in 4 games. That is another level of good. I don’t know how the Blues were meant to stop that, but Binnington tried his best. Ryan Graves also had a good series. It’s hard to talk about any Avs defenceman without talking about Makar, but all of them had a very good series. I never expected Graves to be the highest scorer out of all of them, but he, Makar, Toews, and Girard all looked very good in this series. Grubauer looked about as good as I predicted he would be, but he does benefit from him having a fantastic defensive core in front of him. This team is looking very scary.
St. Louis disappointed me. I thought they would have more fight in them, but instead, I have to defend the goaltender that I have heavily criticized for the past year. He played really well this series despite having an 0.899% Save%. If he keeps playing like he did this series, his contract extension will be well deserved. O’Reilly certainly didn’t play badly in this series, but I don’t think he played as well as he has shown that he can. He was overwhelmed by MacKinnon, as I think anyone would. Torey Krug didn’t impress me whatsoever, but none of the Blues defenders did besides Colton Parayko. I picked Jaden Schwartz as my underrated player for the Blues, as I thought he was the key to St. Louis having a chance in this series. He did not look good at all, and he played far down to people's expectations of him going into this series.
I mean, you can see where things went wrong here. Was it the Avalanches powerplay or the Blues penalty kill that led to an absurd 50.0% PP? The Avalanche dominated in the shots categories, and the GFPG speak for themselves. The Avs are so good at both ends of the rink, and any team that they face in the 2nd round will not be happy. St. Louis needs to make some major changes this offseason. Whether that’s a retool or a beginning of a rebuild, they need to sort this out before it gets too late. I said I had the Avs in 5 games, but as the quote at the beginning of this article says, I kind of seen this coming.