Wait Until Christmas!

I get it. With all of the expectations that came with the revamped roster, many Blues fans were expecting the team to steamroll the opposition and make everyone laugh and smile incessantly this season. With guys like O'Reilly, Maroon, Perron and Bozak coming in; and the infusion of highly-thought-of young guys Thomas, Kyrou, and Blais, (not to mention certain suspects being gone), we had ultra-high hopes. And with good reason.

Obviously, things have not gone as most expected so far. But, come on, are we really all going to call the psychologist, down a bottle of Xanax, and jump on the panic wagon already? The fan forums are lit up with looney-toons-demands and opinions. Fire the #!@% coach. Trade this $#@! guy, or that blankety-blank guy. Blow up the team!! And that's the mild stuff!

When somebody asks me, "What's wrong with the Blues"? Or says, "They're going down the tubes." If it's still early in the season, I usually respond with.."Wait until Christmas." The Blues will play 35 of their 82 games before Christmas. That leaves 47 games in which to get the steamroller cranked up. If we get to the end of the calendar year, and things are in bad shape, then we can start looking for the panic button. But even then it could be too early to say the season is in trouble. As an example of that, take last season.

At Christmas-time last year the Blues had 48 points in the standings and were in 6th place overall in the NHL. They trailed only Nashville at the time in the Central division. We all know how things went after Christmas with the team finishing out of the playoffs. So just as things can go badly like that, there are many examples I could cite of teams figuring it out, getting healthy, making a key deal or something else, to spur them on to a strong run to the post-season. The 2019 trade deadline happens on February 25th. The Blues will play 20 games after the deadline this season. Many teams have made a key move at the deadline and chugged from nowhere into the playoffs. And, as we all know and are constantly reminded, once you get into the playoffs, anything can happen.

Last year's eventual Stanley Cup champions hadn't hit their stride yet by Christmas. We all knew that the Washington Capitals were a good team. But they were tied for second place in their own division with Columbus at that time. Somehow I think the holidays, especially for teams laden with veterans, is the time of year where the adrenaline starts flowing and the urge to lift The Cup kicks in. Until then it's a scramble to figure out strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, it's true that points lost early in the season can't be won back. But a good team will figure it out at some point. And my observations tell me that point is usually around the end of the calendar year when there's still plenty of time to recover.

If we go back to the days before the season began, the one thing everybody seemed to be concerned about was how the goaltending would be. Well, that hasn't been the problem. Jake Allen, and in one game back-up Chad Johnson, have been fine. We sure can't blame any of the losses so far squarely on Allen. He's kept them in a few of the games that could have been blowouts. What has been concerning so far is the lack of strong play by several of the veterans on the team. But veterans being veterans, and with a track record to reference, you have to believe they will come back to the norm sometime soon.

I've been around the rink for a lot of years now. I've seen teams collapse, and I've seen them come out of the dungeon to be excellent. Let's hope our guys figure it out soon and turn into the team most expected them to be. "Wait until Christmas!"