Quote (sirthom @ Apr 26 2019 03:34pm)
Found this interesting:
One of the things that’s been a little tough to cut through for me in the last week is that a lot of the talk surrounding the Jets-Blues series was what, in the end, was wrong with the Jets.
The Jets were a great team that went to the conference final last season and, if not for all the injuries they had to contend with this year, might have done so again. But in much the same way those eight-seed Kings who won the Cup in 2012 were “not the normal eight-seed,” the Jets’ opponents were by no means the “normal three-seed in a division.”
One must always work to make sure they’re separating out the Bad Blues (those coached by Mike Yeo) from the Great Blues (the current iteration). Prior to the coaching change, the Blues started the season with the 10th-worst expected-goals percentage in all situations over the first quarter of the year. Very bad.
The problem was mainly offense, as they were sixth-worst in expected goals per hour compared with a perfectly respectable 13th-best xGA per hour. But they were getting outscored both because they couldn’t get a save from Jake Allen (surprise surprise) and because they weren’t doing enough to generate offense by quality or quantity. They actually had the ninth-highest shooting percentage in the league and a dead-even 100 PDO when Yeo got the boot.
But since then? Interestingly, the expected offense improved but certainly not as much as you’d think given their success. They’ve added about 0.4 expected goals per hour, which will help, but they’re still only 16th in the league in that regard since the coaching change on Nov. 19. Where they really took a great leap forward — and what really allowed both Allen and especially Jordan Binnington to improve so much — is that the Blues just kept everyone away from the net. They’re third in the league in xGA/60 under Berube, cutting their already-respectable 2.69 to just 2.51. The net increase in expected goal difference of about half a goal per hour is why they went from worst to, well, not first I guess, but third in the Central.
Plus, y’know, banged-up Winnipeg finished the season with 99 points, the same number as sucked-for-a-quarter-of-the-year Blues. Yeah Binnington was absolutely unconscious for the first few months of his ascent, but that was only needed to get them back in the race in the first place. He was .936 in his first 20 appearances, in which the Blues went 15-2-1. But even after the start of March — a 12-game stretch in which he went just .912 — the Blues were still 9-3-0 because the Blues are incredibly good defensively and they don’t need Binnington to be stellar.
And let’s be honest here: He wasn’t in the first round. He went .908 (though mostly weighed down by that Game 3 loss that saw him give up a touchdown on 29 shots) and they won comfortably in six games, to the extent there were existential questions about this Jets group, and that’s down to how damn good the Blues are and have been for months. They only allowed about 2.4 expected goals per hour to a team that scored 2.72 per 60 in the regular season.
All of which is to say they should probably be considered a heavy favorite against the Stars, whose offense was subpar this year, with a pretty-good-but-not-great defense (both measures by xG) powered mainly by Ben Bishop’s transcendent, Vezina-worthy season. Dallas may have won its series, but it was below water in expected goals. The fact that the Predators went O-fer on the power play in that series really helped and the Stars of course contributed to that inefficacy, but fair to say the Blues have a little more punch than the Preds, though perhaps not a significant amount more.
If the difference for the Stars once again comes down to Bishop standing on his head, which he certainly did in Round 1 and the season as a whole, that’s very possible. But the Preds ain’t exactly of the full-lineup quality (at least in process, not on paper) the Blues brought since Craig Berube took over.
This was arguably one of the three or four best teams in the league for the last 62 games that dumped a Jets team everyone understandably liked with such ease despite average goaltending certainly speaks to their power.
They are, and have been, way more than 20 incredible Jordan Binnington games, and as long as they don’t run into five, six, seven even-more-incredible Ben Bishop games, they should be considered the heavy favorite in this series.
yea well see
i def wouldnt call us "heavy favorites"
maybe a slight edge due to lineup depth
game 2 tomorrow will be huge. going up 2-0 at home puts all the pressure on the stars, where splitting puts the pressure on us