Blues’ Defense is Preventing Any True Rebuild – The Hockey Writers –

It’s not official yet, but it seems certain that the St. Louis Blues are set to miss the playoffs for the second season in a row, which will. be the first time the franchise has failed to make two consecutive postseasons since the 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons. For general manager Doug Armstrong, that means that the long-simmering discussion of a rebuild has to move to the front burner on high heat. The Blues cannot afford to wallow in mediocrity for many seasons. They need to pick a direction, and if they’re not competing, they need to be actively building for the future.

But if they are going to do that, Armstrong must directly face one of his biggest failings: the team’s nightmare on defense. Since captain Alex Pietrangelo departed for the Vegas Golden Knights in free agency, the blueline has been — and it’s only gotten worse. Now, the Blues are stuck with four underperforming players on expensive, long-term contracts: Colton Parayko, Justin Faulk, Torey Krug, and Nick Leddy.

In this article, we’ll take a look at just how bad the defense is, and then talk about each of the “big four” in order: whether they can still contribute, and what, if anything, the Blues can do to mitigate their contracts. But if you’re impatient, here’s the big takeaway: the Blues can’t effectively rebuild until they totally overhaul the defense.

Four Years of Bad… Then Worse…

It’s no secret that the Blues won the Stanley Cup in 2019, with a roster built primarily around the defense. So how could things have gone so wrong so quickly?

We already touched on the departure of Pietrangelo. The former captain was the cornerstone of the blueline for most of a decade, and without him, the Stanley Cup would have been unattainable. But that wasn’t the team’s only loss. Immediately after the Stanley Cup season, Joel Edmundson left in the trade that brought Faulk to St. Louis. Shortly thereafter, veterans Carl Gunnarsson and Jay Bouwmeester would retire. The Blues would sign Krug in free agency to replace the departing Pietrangelo, and, in the blink of an eye, the Blues had an almost entirely new defense.

Related: Blues Defense Could Be Wildly Different Next Season

Unfortunately for Armstrong, the “new” defense was not an “improved” defense. Very quickly, a team that had been known for its defense for a decade or more now had a defense that was below average, then outright bad. The chart below reflects the team’s trajectory over the past four seasons….