If you read my site or follow my X page (thank you!), you know that stats are my hockey religion and pretty much everything I do leans heavily on the work of Natural Stat Trick. However, I am well aware that the stats only tell part of the story (and that's the impetus for today's post). There's also the other incredibly important part of, you know, players actually executing on the ice and scoring more goals than the opponent to win. A crucial distinction that separates winners from losers.

Which of course the Blues did not do, at all. They got their asses whipped on the scoreboard, as they should. But if you just looked at the stats, it paints a much different picture.

Not that this changes anything -- it doesn't. It does, however, imply that maybe this was just kind of a weird game where all the bounces went Minnesota's way and the Blues were fighting an uphill battle all game. It just happened to take place on the first game of the season, the game Blues fans had been waiting for for the last 6 months, excitedly waiting to see what this team could do for an encore after finishing last year strong and taking the President's Trophy winner to OT in Game 7.

Here's the 5 on 5 numbers, and I must warn you ... they are rather one-sided:

Total Shots on Goal: 26-21 in favor of the Blues
5v5 Scoring Chances For: 24-13 in favor of the Blues
5v5 High Danger Chances For: 10-8 in favor of the Blues
5v5 Expected Goals For v Expected Goals Against: 2.8 v 1.59 in favor of the Blues

So the Blues basically dominated the Wild at 5v5, but in the end scored no goals and gave up 5. That's the story the statistics are telling us.

Now, let's go beyond the stats and analyze the why.

Okay then, what happened? Well, quite simply the Blues got away from what worked so well for them last year. They put a lot of shots on goal, but what they didn't do was create traffic in front of the net to block goaltender Filip Gustavsson's line of sight and make those shots harder to track. Most of their shots appeared to hit Gustavsson right in that big ugly Wild logo stitched onto the chest of his jersey. The Blues can't continue to do that as a plan of attack going forward or they ain't gonna score many goals. In fact, doing that they likely won't score any.

Additionally, Blues goaltender Jordan Binnington let in a lot of soft goals, as evidenced by allowing 5 goals on 21 shots, with only an expected goals allowed of 2.04 (at all strengths). Not that this would've changed the outcome any as the Blues scored no goals, but when you allow 5 goals against only 2 expected goals there were several fluky soft goals let in.

All that to say, here is the bottom line:
Final score: Blues 0, Wild 5. Blues booed by the fans who paid their hard-earned money to come see this team at home.

Ugly, ugly ... fucking ugly. Fortunately, there are still 81 more games left for the Blues to get this thing turned around and have the underlying stats match the final score.