SB Nation St. Louis: All Posts by Laura Astorian

Are The Blues Getting New Jerseys And Ditching The Alternate Logo?

2013-05-24T18:03:49Z

Sometimes a little bit of a refresh is needed, isn't it? Your old clothes aren't fashionable anymore, so you go shopping for some sleaker styles. Don't be surprised if you wind up bumping into the Blues while you wait in like at a fitting room. In Jeremy Rutherford's most recent Blues chat, someone asked about the Blues' uniforms and if they will be getting a bit of a revamp like the Dallas Stars' uniforms and Carolina Hurricanes'. Here's what Rutherford had to say:

I heard some teams will be having new uniforms next year (Dallas and Carolina), any plans for the Blues to do an update?

I'm hearing whispers that there may be changes in store for the Blues' uniforms. Don't have any details whatsoever. But don't be surprised if we hear something.

Heard Stillman is discussing probably scrapping 3rd logo. Any truth?

Haven't heard that specifically but could be true. Third logo has Dave Checketts imprints all over it. I know folks who would consider that a crime scene.

It'd be a shame to lose the thirds in my opinion more thanks to the color scheme than to the logo specifically, though I do like the logo. I prefer the thirds' lack of terrible Reebok Edge piping as well - it's less busy, and it gets straight to the point.

I'll go out on a limb and assume that if the Blues get a re-do it won't be anything hugely different -- it'll probably be cleaning things up and ditching the piping. None of this whole "let's randomly add red!" stuff of revamps past.

What Was Your Favorite Blues Moment Of 2013?

2013-05-23T13:18:59Z

I think that enough time's passed since the Blues got the boot to look back at the positives of the regular season. Sure, there were stretches of meh that were more than unexplainable, but the Blues really had some moments that showed that they're on the right path, hiccups and all.

This is more of an all-call for you guys - what was your favorite Blues moment of the shortened season? There are quite a few to choose from: the 6-0 opening shutout of the Red Wings was fun, albeit a little bit of a source of inflated optimism. The sensational start of rookie Vladimir Tarasenko before he was felled by a concussion was something that got people whispering good things about the Russian. Look at Chris Stewart, playing like it's a contract year! Sure, the playoffs weren't the best time for him, but his 18 goals during the regular season was a pleasant reminder of the player that the Blues acquired a few seasons ago.

Of course, you have to look at the acquisitions of Jordan Leopold and Jay Bouwmeester, and the excellent defensive play that followed. The CPR line was a fantastic story, especially in the playoffs, as was the NHL-readiness test that Jake Allen passed with flying colors.

Personally, my favorite story was the redemption of Brian Elliott. His Feburary had folks on Twitter making "regression past the mean" jokes, but the way that he battled back and blew everyone out of the water in April was a sight to be seen. I don't think that I've ever seen someone's GAA drop that much in the course of a month.

So, what say you, loyal readers? What was your favorite moment of this season?

Blues 2013 Unrestricted Free Agents: Re-Sign Or Free Up The Cash?

2013-05-21T18:18:54Z

This past season, the Blues showed you can have regular season success with a low payroll - a reaffirmation of what they proved the previous season. Having the second-lowest payroll in the league ($52,185,361 according to CapGeek.com) leads to having the second most money to spend in the off-season on free-agents, right? Not for the Blues. They'll do what they've always done - stand pat with most of what they have, add a few quality pieces, and try to groom their core players for more success in the next season.

The trick this year is that several of those core players are up for new deals. Restricted free agents include Chris Stewart, Patrik Berglund, Evgeny Grachev, Alex Pietrangelo, Kris Russell, Ian Cole, Kevin Shattenkirk, Jake Allen, and a slew of AHL players.

Obviously, the focus there is on re-upping Pietrangelo, Shattenkirk, and Berglund - and they'll get paid. Stewart fought for a decent payday all season, but his playoff performance was beyond disappointing. Taking that small sample size out of consideration, he'll probably also get paid well.

I'll do a post later on the pros and cons of qualifying offers for these guys,but here I wanted to specifically focus on a few UFAs. The highest paid guys up for free agency are Andy McDonald, Jamie Langenbrunner, and Jordan Leopold.

Andy McDonald

Andy McDonald is a prime candidate to not return to the Blues next season.

The pending UFA got paid $4,700,000 this past season, as well as the season before that. Prior to that, McDonald was paid $5,200,000, a sizable payraise from his $3,333,333 a year deal. McDonald has been the Blues' li'l waterbug, making space where none exists and zipping to the front of the net with aplomb. He's scored 90 goals in 294 games, but as of late he's been very prone to injury, especially concussions. He only netted seven goals this year in 37 games and was invisible in the Blues six-game series loss to the Kings. This is in marked contrast to the year before, where McDonald had five goals and five assists in nine playoff games; again, though, when faced with a highly physical Kings team, McDonald's output dropped off.

McDonald is obviously in some sort of decline, though whether it's due to age (he's 35) or injury or both. The question is this: is he worth re-signing? The Blues need to save money for their pending RFAs, and dumping a huge salary like McDonald's is a big step towards that. Could the Blues sign him for a paycut? Absolutely. Would he still be a very useful player to have? Absolutely. However, with Dimitrj Jaskin coming up and Jaden Schwartz along with Vladimir Tarasenko presumably taking on a bigger role, having McDonald on the team isn't a necessity like it was in years past.

Jamie Langenbrunner

Langenbrunner missed nearly all of the 2013 season, whether benched or out thanks to an injured hip. His salary was an affordable $1.5 million, but for someone who is 37 and who now has a big question mark over his head, is that a worthwhile investment for the team?

Chances are good that Langs won't return to the team either.

The upshot of Langenbrunner (and Scott Nichol, who is a UFA as well) is that he brings a veteran voice to the locker room that was very obviously missed during long stretches this season and during the playoffs. Would the Blues have had as many issues with players doing their own thing had Langs been there to tell them to get over it? He traveled with the team toward the end of the season and in the playoffs, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that it was done to give him a chance to help work out some issues.

I'll also go out on a limb here and say that no team will sign him next year, much like his compatriot and soon to be fellow UFA Jason Arnott. I appreciate what Langebrunner brought to the team, but I think it might be time for him to consider retirement.

Jordan Leopold

If there's a UFA to return, Leopold is probably it.

I think it's safe to say that no one would be terribly crushed if Doug Armstrong made a move to sign Leopold to an extension over the summer. He's not the only late-season defensive upgrade that the Blues made - Jay Bouwmeester helped calm things down as well - but having someone of his ability paired with Kevin Shattenkirk proves to be a great mentoring situation for the young defenseman. It also allowed Barret Jackman to move down with Roman Polak, which turned the third defensive pairing into a shut-down duo that closed out the season strongly (Polak in the playoffs, especially game six, was a different matter).

if the Blues resign one UFA, then Leopold needs to be it. Nichol is expendable, Langenbrunner's career may well be over, and McDonald is, unfortunately, expendable.

A Cultural Difference Separates Blues And Cardinals

2013-05-18T17:04:54Z

I've been batting this article around in my head since literally the night playoffs ended for the Blues. Do I write it here, do I write it at my site? Do I write it at all? Am I the only one who has noticed a huge cultural difference between the Blues and Cardinals and how they handle disappointment?

Of course, while thinking on this, Bernie Miklasz kind beat me to the punch a little bit. That'll learn me to worry about if bringing the Cards up on Game Time is a good idea or not. In today's post, he wonders why the Blues are so satisfied - they didn't play as well this year as last, they didn't win a single playoff series, and yet Ken Hitchcock and Doug Armstrong put a positive spin on things. In his post, Miklasz writes:

Hitchcock seemed offended by the post-series criticism of the Blues. I don’t know why. They blew a 2-0 series lead and lost four consecutive games. The Blues were up by two goals in Game 4 but squandered the lead, the game and the opportunity to go ahead 3-1 in the series.

But Hitchcock emphasized that the Blues – after being swept by LA last season – were more competitive this time around.

Do you get a trophy for that?

"To write off the playoffs and just say it was not good is really not fair to this team," Hitchcock said.

I’ll write it: It was not good. Your team had a 2-0 series lead and didn’t win again.

And I’m not sure why Armstrong thinks it’s so terrible for fans and media to link the present-day Blues to the franchise’s history of postseason futility.

"That’s somebody else’s issue," Armstrong said. "To live in the past and try to exorcise ghosts is irrelevant."

Irrelevant?

Simply preposterous.

Simply correct. The Blues seem to be caught up in this culture of participation. "We did well!" Yes, you did. Making the playoffs should never be a team's goal - winning the Stanley Cup should be. Sometimes you need to be realistic about expectations, sure, but doing so means not building up expectations during the year and then justifying when they fail. Your fans expect you to compete for the Stanley Cup every season.

Of course, being Blues fans, we're a realistic bunch. We know what the front office is doing, and for the most part we just accept it. The team's just kind of "happy to be here," and so are we. Believe me, that attitude isn't the best to have, but it's next to impossible to shake.

During game five of the NLCS last year, when Lance Lynn beaned the hell out of second base on a botched throw to God-knows-where, I turned to my friend that I was watching the game with and I said this: "Well, that's it. They're done, but they never should have made it this far, so I'm happy."

During game six of the 2011 World Series, I kept thinking "well, the Cards tried. This was a really great series, win or lose."

In one of those situations, I was spot on. In the other I wound up being pleasantly surprised. In neither was I thinking like the Cardinals organization - I was thinking like the Blues.

Later on in his article Bernie, who must be a mind-reader, because I was thinking this same thing writes:

The Cardinals have won 11 World Series championships, including two since 2006. And after the Cardinals blew a 3-1 lead to San Francisco in the 2012 NL championship series, manager Mike Matheny and his players were furious and inconsolable.

That hasn’t changed. Mention the NLCS to Matheny, and a cold, hard look of disgust appears on his face. Adam Wainwright frequently discusses the anger that remains from losing the NLCS, and how the players use it for motivation. They want to make amends.

There’s a profound difference in the standards that the Cardinals and Blues set for themselves.

The Blues always promise to do better next year. The Cardinals, even after a situation that in any other season before last year would have been impossible for the team (the second wild card helped), want to make things better. So far this season they've come out swinging with the best record in the National League and best winning percentage in baseball at the time of this writing. They don't make excuses. They fix things, because they have a dedication to excellence.

The Blues have a dedication to existence.

One of those two things wins championships, the other wins the occasional division. If the Blues want to stop being the little brother of St. Louis sports teams, they need to take a look at their neighbors around the corner. Having a Stanley Cup isn't a prerequisite to winning one - they can start a culture of winning any time that they want to. Stop trying to make fans feel better, and start making fans expect good things.

Cardinals fans enter nearly every season with a reasonable expectation: that the team will contend. More often than not, they're rewarded. Blues fans dare to enter a season with that expectation, and they get the roller-coaster ride that was this shortened season. This needs to change.

David Backes Saves Puppies. Again. Off-Season Puff Piece Alert!

2013-05-17T21:38:49Z

Apologies for the couple of days of no new content. Something's been up with SB Nation's servers, and I've been a bit slammed at work. Obviously we've all been kind of down with the playoff elimination, so I've dug up not one but two instances of David Backes and his wife, Kelly, being awesome.

In the first one, Backes flew his plane to the Tri-States area (apparently this article doesn't believe in specifying a city - is Keokuk a city? Where? What state?) to take three dogs back to the Five Acres Animal Rescue in St. Charles. One of the dogs, Meaty, looks like he could suit up for the Blues next year. Dog is big.

You will cringe at the part were they talk about how Backes has "extra time." I'll just go ahead and warn you.

I'll also warn you that the photos in this Riverfront Times story may make you cry. Phineas, a three year old labrador, is basically on doggie death row and has been for a year for his third biting incident. His owners dispute the first two, and the third one was apparently so minor that the parents of the child he bit didn't press charges and are even advocating for Salem to not put Phineas down.

The city's come under fire for how they've been holding Phineas until the decision to euthanize him is made final, and Backes wants to fly the dog out to Five Acres to make sure that whatever time he has left is comfortable - or maybe just get him a nice vacation while the city decides to not put him down.

Are The Blues Ripe For A Goalie Controversy?

2013-05-13T19:50:47Z

Well, that ended well. I'm not talking about the season - I'm talking about the Blues' goaltending situation. Is it any more clear now than it was in February? Nope. Do the Blues have a starter? Sure. They apparently have three of them. While that sounds like a situation any team should be lucky to have, it presents quite the quandary for the Blues. One of the starters has quite a huge contract and is developing a wonky groin. One of them occasionally has problems with consistency, sets his crease aflame with terribleness, and has to be sent to the AHL for a conditioning stint before he comes back better than ever. The third one is a rookie with 15 games of NHL experience.

Fan-freaking-tastic. Personally, by the end of the year, I felt the most comfortable with Brian Elliott in net since he was obviously in some otherworldly zone. That zone basically continued through the playoffs - game four featured three goals against that were just next to impossible to stop, and the overtime goal in game five changed direction, as did the shit goal that ended the season in game six. The games that were lost in the playoffs were a team effort (especially that last one - God, people, clear the damned puck) that are really hard to place 100% on Elliott. The games he won in the regular season and playoffs, well, if the Blues could have scored a few more goals he could have had a margin for error. They didn't, he didn't, and he realized that.

Elliott is a piece of the potential controversy because he pushed Jaroslav Halak out of the role of starter, and Halak never got a chance to get back into the swing of things. Ken Hitchcock's main job is to make sure that the Blues win, and Elliott was giving the Blues the best chance to do so night after night. How do you risk losing valuable points by tossing in a cold goaltender? Halak could have gotten back into form, but it was impossible for him to get the playing time to do so. His groin is also becoming a question mark. If he stays healthy, he's a starter. If his groin acts up, he's Kari Lehtonen with more reliable backups, but that kind of situation throws off a team's routine and rhythm.

Allen's situation is probably the easiest one to figure out: if he needs to, he'll start in the AHL next year no problem. Does that cut into Jordan Binnington's playing time? Yes, but there is a league called the ECHL where goalies can also get playing time and experience. if Allen gets called up to the Blues, Binnington gets called up to the Wolves.

So, to answer the headline's question: no. The only controversy is over "who the starter is," because NHL fans have a strange compulsion to have to have a starter and they need to have a backup. Tandems where it's 1A and 1B freak people out - look at Vancouver and the Cory Schneider/Roberto Luongo situation. Instead of being thankful that there are two more than capable goaltenders on the team - with more in the pipeline! - people have to get irritated that there's not a clear-cut difference between the two NHL goalies.

That's why reports of a Hitchcock/Halak kerfuffle have such potential to get blown out of proportion. Hitchcock called it an "everyday occurrence," and it is. It's someone who hadn't played in a month, who assumed he was the starter, asking for playing time and not being happy with not getting it. The earth kept spinning after the discussion, presumably because stuff like the disagreement happens all of the time and is no big deal. Hitchcock couldn't throw a cold Halak in net in the middle of the playoffs, because Elliott was playing well and giving the team a chance to win. A coach's responsibility is to give the team every opportunity to win a game, and regardless of what you think about Hitchcock's decisions, you can't really argue with him using Elliott.

There will be all sorts of issues to sort out this off-season, and I fully expect the Blues to do what they usually do: stand pat and maybe add a cog or two. There shouldn't be any drama coming from the team, so some of the fans will invent their own to pass the time with. Is it something people should worry about? No. I think that there are bigger net-missing fish to fry.

Kings Vs. Blues Round One Recap: What Happened?

2013-05-11T23:39:07Z

There are more causes of death for the Blues this postseason than there are bodies at the Body Farm. This was the closest series I can remember watching in the playoffs for a long time, and I remember thinking after the first game that there wasn't going to be much room for error. There wasn't. Each game was decided by a goal, each game had big hits and hard hockey, and each game was immensely winnable for either team.

That's what makes this series loss so frustrating. The Blues could have won. Why didn't they? At the risk of wallowing in misery, because that's what we as Blues fans are so consistently good at, there are two particular chronic problems that the Blues can't seem to address. They need a finisher, and they need a playmaker. The bulk of our team are big guys who clear space. Sure, they can score - and they should score (which we'll get to here in a second) - but that's not really their job. On any other team, the Blues' scorers would be ancillary guys, or the guys you turn to for punch and support scoring. While I love that the Blues are grinding and hard hitting - which is what made this series so much fun to watch, and is a big characteristic of the Kings as well - the fact that they can't manage more than one or two goals a game is disconcerting. It's a symptom of the bigger problem at large.

The Blues' hometown guys got called out by Hitchcock in his postgame comments, and that's great. The playmaker that should succeed, David Perron, spent most of his season dangling his way into the penalty box. It's not all Perron's fault, of course. Who was he going to set up? Who consistently threatened to score? The defense? Alex Steen? Those were the only guys who were a threat in this series.

But they couldn't hit the broad side of the barn. No one could. You want a depressing read? Check out Bernie's column today at STLToday.com:

In the series the Blues missed the net on shots 101 times.

But for some reason, management stays with the same cast of players that can't put pucks in the same zip code as the opponents' goal when the Blues desperately need a big score. These guys couldn't shoot the puck less accurately if you spiked the Gatorade with LSD and sent them on the ice blindfolded.

David Backes and Patrik Berglund missed the net 11 times. Alexander Steen and Alex Pietrangelo missed the net 10 times. David Perron (7) and T.J. Oshie (4) were repeatedly off the mark - and at critical moments.

Good lord God almighty. That's what happens when you have a team made up entirely of helpers.

I'm not going to blame people, because I firmly believe that the effort was there, the desire was there. The ability is what was lacking, and that's what needs to be addressed.

Brian Elliott gave the team a chance to win in every game, and while he could have been better in game four, or maybe could have stopped the shot that chipped off of Roman Polak's stick at the end of the second period, that's not why the Blues lost. They lost because they don't have that one or two guys to wrap it up.

What the Blues need to do in the off-season is a totally different post. After this season, and after this series, it's become apparent that the number one need is one that's been the Blues' number one need for years now: get someone who can score.

Blues At Kings Game Four Recap: Blues Lose Game 2-1, Series 4-2

2013-05-11T04:38:53Z

Never before have I seen a hockey team work so much for so little. Such quality play from the Blues, and nothing to show for it. The smart defense has been there for the most part, the Blues had good goaltending that gave them a chance to win, and they had an energy line that should have rubbed off on the rest of the team.

The downside is, they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn all series long, and when you're playing a goaltender like Jonathan Quick, you gotta make him work for it. The Blues did, a little - but not nearly enough.

This series had everything from the Blues but scoring. It even came complete with a deflating last-second goal, albiet in the second period - still wound up being the game winner, though:

Ugh.

That's an appropriate way for the season to end. Not with a bang, but with a groan. The effort was there this year, but not on a consistent basis. There were some games where you felt like they were going to really bust their asses, and then there were others where you knew what would happen: the defense and bottom lines would work hard, and the top lines'd grip their sticks too tight, everyone trying to be a hero, and miss the net.

All in all, though, this was the most evenly matched playoff series that I've seen in years, and one bounce one way or the other, and every game easily could have had a different outcome. At least we can take comfort in knowing that the Blues will need some Icy Hot before they hit the links. They went down swinging, but they went down nonetheless.

Congrats to the Kings on a hard-fought series.