Missed Connections

Key moments from Jets-Blues Game 1

The Blues had a 3-2 lead over the Jets with less than two minutes to go in the second period & this is when Jordan Kyrou snagged a loose puck out of the skates of Jets defenseman Dylan Samberg for a breakaway chance. St Louis’ most dangerous player off the rush, Kyrou had plenty of time & space to put Winnipeg in a major hole heading into the third period of Game 1, but Winnipeg’s star goaltender was just a step head of him & kept it a one-goal game. This major save was also the last one Hellebuyck would have to make at five-on-five play for a long time, as the Jets had scored three unanswered goals before the Blues even recorded their next shot attempt late in the third period with the game out of reach.

This is what the playoffs are all about. A small break here & there often leads to a wave of events. You could play your worst game for 45 minutes and still win if you dominate the other 15. This is pretty much how it went for the Blues and how they almost stole Game 1 from the Presidents Trophy winners. They’re obviously outmatches as a wild card, but they don’t come into this completely out of their depth. Their style of play is frustrating to play against because the thrive on dominating small chunks of the game where they bury their chances & focus the rest on not getting destroyed through checking & general disruption in the defensive zone. If you got the elite talent, it can work as long as it doesn’t become your entire strategy, as we saw in the SCF last year.

Regardless, the Blues seemed to stretch the limits of this in Game 1 & had to pay the bill for it in the third period, where their only shot attempt that wasn’t blocked was a long-ranger from Phillip Broberg with 8 minutes left. Which was the same number of shot attempts that their second line as a unit produced for the entire game. It reminded me a lot of football where everything is going according to script for the first half & then falls apart when the other team catches on & there’s no real way to stop it because the boulder’s already halfway down the cliff. We’re not going to do a deep dive on this, but we are going to look at some big picture stats & how some smaller plays tie into them.

Game 1 Stats

The Blues played the style they wanted with this being a physical, grinding type of game where they could disrupt the Jets passing plays & force them to be out of sync just enough to make this a coin-flip. They got a great first two periods from Robert Thomas’ line & some found money with Oskar Sundqvist going top-shelf on Hellebuyck late in the first period. Where things went wrong for them was making the next play after a disruption. Notice how few shots off the rush Winnipeg had despite carrying the puck in 21 times. Also notice how they created six scoring chances off controlled entries despite only seven shots off the rush. Putting two-and-two together, you might think this is them capitalizing on their chances, but there were no goals off the rush in this game. In fact, rush chances were only 2-2 with Jaret Anderson-Dolan getting both of Winnipeg’s.

Where the Jets are gonna be a pain to deal with is they are not letting plays die after Plan A falls apart. Part of that is the play of the aforementioned defenseman Dylan Samberg. On his 10 puck retrievals in the defensive zone, 8 of them led to controlled exits and there were a few I had to throw-up because Winnipeg was able to clear the zone just enough for them to force a delayed offsides, which meant the Jets could regroup & attack at their own pace. Sometimes that’s not always a good thing because you have to beat a team in defensive structure, but this where the deliberate play of the Jets defense can be very frustrating to deal with.

This shift is full of the Jets recovering quickly after Plan A doesn’t work, starting with the breakout that gets picked off in the neutral zone & then reset by Dylan Samberg. Neal Pionk then does what I wish more teams did more of, basically acting like he’s going to rim the puck around the boards but hits Scheifele for an easy entry instead. It’s defended well by St. Louis so the Jets have to send it to a corner & work a cycle instead. Normally, this isn’t ideal off a controlled entry, but the Blues had a recurring problem in this game of having a lot of guys retrieve pucks with nowhere to go with them (see the icing that led to the game-winner), so they have to reverse it and go back into a defensive structure. Scheifele & Connor make a great switch from high-to-low to keep the play contained and it turns into a low-to-high play that the Blues try to intercept, presumably for a breakaway. Samberg quickly gets rid of it and so does Connor as the Blues converge on him & it now turns into a behind the net play from Schefeiele, one of the best in the league at creating from there. The change of direction he makes at 47-48 seconds gets Buchnevich chasing him just enough for Connor to get open & gets a stuff-chance. Given how much went wrong on this shift for the Blues, you would rather give this up than Connor setting up for a one-timer here, but the Jets went to school on this type of setup.

Alex Iafallo’s game-tying goal happened in almost the exactly same scenario with the same players on the ice in the power-vs.-power matchup the Jets rolled out. The Jets couldn’t get up the ice with numbers & speed, so they opted to play controlled & connected instead. The initial breakout pass gets disrupted, so they reverse it, make a couple of short passes up the ice & get into the zone in a 2v3 situation, but this time they’re a little more in-sync with Connor getting the puck to Scheifele in the corner & St. Louis can’t even touch the puck once during this sequence before he finds Iafallo at the net mouth with Colton Parayko just a fraction late on the stick-check. Generating controlled entries doesn’t always mean you’re creating off the rush & the good teams are the ones who excel at this.

The chances the Blues gave up probably aren’t the most frustrating part for them, as that’s going to happen in a matchup like this. There were opportunities to do a little more when the game opened up & they couldn’t get anyone on the same page.

Referencing the game stats, the Blues didn’t create a single counter-attack chance in the entire game and their two rush chances came off a bobbled puck in the neutral zone & a clean exit. The third line did a nice job getting a chance off a broken play on their goal & Thomas’ line did some good work on the cycle, but the counter-attacks & neutral zone reloads are where this team thrived during their run & they couldn’t do any of that in this game. Lots of missed passes in the neutral zone or skating it into a trap with nobody else around to continue the play. Not having Holloway as that shooter & middle guy to make life easier for Kyrou loomed large in this game & I’m not sure how you fix it aside from hoping Schenn doesn’t play this poorly the rest of the series. He’s always been a player who lives at the extremes with his on-ice impact, especially at center. We’ll see if there’s some new lines for tonight’s game or different matchups when this returns to St. Louis.