St. Louis Blues 2023-24 season preview: Playoff chances, projected points, roster rankings

May 2024 · 12 minute read

By Sean GentilleDom Luszczyszyn and Shayna Goldman

We’d hate to say we told you so, but even we didn’t expect such a dramatic collapse from the St. Louis Blues.

The Blues were last season’s most obvious regression candidate and they made due on that with an 81-point season, down from 109 the year prior.

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The in-between — a 95-point team — feels much closer to the Blues’ true talent level over the last two seasons. Going forward, it’s a lot more difficult to be that rosy. The Blues lost a lot of talent at the deadline and have a lot of key players on the wrong side of the age curve.

The Blues are far from hopeless, but with a lot of fierce competition around the league, they start the year closer to the lottery teams than the ones vying for a playoff spot.

The projection

There probably isn’t a worse spot to land in than the one the Blues find themselves in to start the season.

The Blues are at the bottom of a group of teams that don’t look good enough for a serious shot at the postseason and aren’t exactly bad enough for a serious shot at the No. 1 pick either. The Blues are six points clear of the next worst team, but also seven points away from the teams with actually tangible playoff chances. No man’s land.

Maybe the Blues make the playoffs — a one-in-12 shot isn’t nothing and The Model notoriously isn’t fond of the way the team earns wins. Oddsmakers are closer to 87 or 88 points, for what it’s worth.

Maybe the Blues successfully tank, earn a top-five pick and do a quick retool to get back into the playoffs soon. A 35 percent chance of landing in the bottom five does look appealing.

Those would both be great paths, but unfortunately for St. Louis, a season a lot like last year’s is most likely. The Blues weren’t good, lost a lot of talent at the deadline, and didn’t really do anything to improve during the summer either.

Pick a lane or be stuck — St. Louis has chosen the latter.

Percentiles with the bar graphs are based on each player’s Offensive, Defensive and Net Rating relative to their time-on-ice slot, i.e. the first forward is compared to other first forwards only.

The strengths

Of the seven teams we’ve previewed, the Blues are the first to have three legitimate top-line forwards on the roster. Of course, those guys — Pavel Buchnevich, Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou — are partially to blame for St. Louis’ residency in no-man’s land; all three should be good enough to carry the team out of the bottom of the lottery, but probably won’t be good enough to drag them to playoff wins. Still, a decent core is better than no core at all, and their presence is as big a reason as any to believe in the Blues for the next few years.

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Buchnevich, at 28, is the oldest of the three and the only one not signed for $8.125 million through 2031, since Thomas and Kyrou signed identical extensions ahead of last season. He also might be the best — our Player Tier project has him pegged as a bubble All-Star — and certainly has been the most consistent and complete.

Even as things crumbled around him in 2022-23, he was a two-way spark in St. Louis’ top six, making positive impacts on both sides of the puck in a variety of roles. No Blue did a better job of generating shots off the forecheck, according to Corey Sznjader’s tracking data. In that particular area, Buchnevich is clustered with other elite offensive talents like Jason Robertson, Mitch Marner and Mathew Barzal.

From a production standpoint, Buchnevich, in 63 games played, handled his business; he was 25th in the league in points per 60 at five-on-five with 2.61, tucked between William Nylander and Brock Nelson. Mix in half-decent defensive impacts, especially among the rest of St. Louis’ top six, and you should see a player coming off one of the more underrated seasons in the league. The model projects him to have a plus-13 Net Rating this year, dead center for the average No. 1 forward.

Really, the only complaint the Blues should have with Buchnevich’s play is that they didn’t get enough of it due to some injury issues. The same can’t quite be said about Thomas or Kyrou. Each underwhelmed, to some extent, in their first post-extension seasons. Each also remains a positive contributor, both overall and for where they slot in on the roster.

Thomas, who turned 24 in July, couldn’t follow up his 2021-22 breakout when he put up 77 points in 72 games and emerged as one of the league’s best playmaking centers. Last season he experienced drops nearly across the board, particularly in his shots and high-danger assists, and saw his five-on-five point production drop from 2.93/60 (tied for 21st in the league) to 2.05/60 (tied for 125th).

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That was enough to reroute Thomas’ trajectory a bit; a repeat would’ve put him farther up the food chain among first-line centers. The way it played out, though, left him closer to the low end. Based on what he showed as a 22-year-old, Thomas can be more than a half-decent No. 2 forward — which is where he’s projected to sit this season — but it hinges on fixing his defensive game. St. Louis needs him to be a no-doubt first-liner, and they need him to do it without the veteran goal-scoring insulation they’ve had in the past. He has the talent necessary to make it happen.

The same can be said of Kyrou, a dynamic offensive talent who put up 73 points while giving up plenty in his own end — enough, in fact, to be put on some degree of notice by GM Doug Armstrong and coach Craig Berube. Like Thomas, his points/60 dropped from 2.93 down to 2.2, with his defensive warts a little more on display.

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One coach who believes in both players’ ability to bounce back also gave some insight that could double as a warning now that Ryan O’Reilly is gone and the team is somewhere below playoff caliber: “When you play with certain guys, you can cheat. And if you’re not the go-to guy, you can cheat a little bit. And if you have a really good team, you can cheat a little bit. But when you have to become the guy, and you’re cheating, you’re not winning.”

Perhaps the best sign for the Blues: They were never better than when Buchnevich, Thomas and Kyrou played on the same line. Together, those three outscored opponents 14-7 and put up a relatively solid expected goals percentage of 47. In a vacuum, a full season’s worth of that would be fine; as a trio, they have tons of ability and a diverse set of offensive skills.

Elsewhere, Brandon Saad remains a balanced, meat-and-potatoes player who’d be best served on a third line; Jakub Vrana is worth a flier for his five-on-five offensive upside alone; and Calle Rosen is a completely competent bottom-pair defender. For a team that still has playoff aspirations, “strengths” are pretty hard to come by.

The weaknesses

We mentioned Rosen at the bottom of the strengths section. He was the only Blues defenseman to come up for a reason; everyone in front of him on the depth chart, from Justin Faulk down to Nick Leddy, is projected to underperform relative to their spots in the lineup — some drastically so.

The end result, and the single biggest reason to think the Blues could be in for a world of pain this season, is a defense that, according to projected Net Ranking, is No. 30 in the league. Virtually every player, even the ones who add some positive value, is overextended. Only six franchises — Anaheim, Arizona, Montreal, Philadelphia, St. Louis and San Jose — failed to place a single defenseman in our NHL Top 125. Most teams had two. It’s a waterfall effect that the Blues will struggle to overcome.

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As a unit, their biggest issue last season was denying zone entries. No team in the league, according to Sznjader’s data, was less effective in that space, and only a few allowed more scoring chances off those failed denials. St. Louis’ issues there, combined with the decline and departure of O’Reilly and overall ambivalence from their forwards, more than negated some half-decent work on puck retrievals and zone exits.

Faulk, in particular, has decent offensive impacts — 40 even-strength points isn’t bad. He also has an expected goals rate of about 42 percent, which is bad, and an expected goals against/60 of 3.23, which was the 15th worst in the league among players with at least 500 minutes. A couple ticks behind him, at 3.25, was Torey Krug. If that’s the kind of defensive process you’re getting from the top of your blue line, it’d take a whole lot of point production to act as a counterbalance.

This, in short, was not an orderly or effective blue line, and the personnel is mainly the same … except a year older. Of the projected top six, only Rosen is younger than 30, and he’s 29. Colton Parayko, at plus-1, has the only projected positive Defensive Rating. Improvement, it seems, will have to come from changes to the system, maturation by the forwards or, who knows, a whole bunch of goals.

In the past (2021-22 specifically, when nine players hit the 20-goal mark), the Blues came close. In 2022-23, they did not. This season, they can count on Kyrou, Buchnevich and Thomas to hit that mark. Beyond them? Vrana can get there if he’s healthy. Saad and Brayden Schenn are possibilities, too. Barring a Kevin Hayes resurgence, though, that’s where the list seems to end. And if that’s the case, barring a Jack Adams-and-then-some job by Berube or a wild run of remarkably good luck, what remains is a poor defensive team without the offensive firepower necessary to bail themselves out.

The other option would be a streak of sustained Vezina-caliber play from Jordan Binnington. That’s unlikely. Last season, in 61 appearances, he allowed 6.45 goals above expected — a step in the right direction after an ugly regular season in 2021-22, and an understandable performance given his workload.

Only five goalies leaguewide, in fact, faced more expected goals than he did last season, as good a testament to St. Louis’ poor defensive play as any. Be that as it may, he wasn’t regularly bailing his teammates out, either. Three of the five goalies ahead of him — Juuse Saros, Ilya Sorokin and Connor Hellebuyck — got Vezina votes. The fourth was Anaheim’s John Gibson, who wasn’t great but also outperformed Binnington. Success in front of a lineup this leaky isn’t impossible. In Binnington’s case, though, it’s highly unlikely. The Blues, if they want this to work, will need a whole lot more than an .894 save percentage from their starter. And whether they should want it to work is another question entirely.

The wild card

Can Jakub Vrana, Kasperi Kapanen and Sammy Blais spark the team’s offense again?

The Blues’ strength in 2021-22 was a deep, versatile forward group. The 2023-24 version likely can’t come close to matching that, because there isn’t that same offensive spark from their supporting talent. Vrana, Kapanen and Blais were fantastic to close last season, scoring at over a 50-point pace after the deadline, but each one has one flaw or another that makes it unlikely the magic can repeat.

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Kapanen’s one of the streakiest of the bunch. His strength is his skating speed, but there’s not enough oomph elsewhere. The winger lacks two-way punch, and despite getting breakaways, he doesn’t always convert on his chances even when paired with high-end forwards.

Blais has the worst Offensive Rating of this depth trio after an unproductive, disappointing tenure in New York. He’s not a volume shooter, but tends to cluster his shots to the home plate area. At his best, he can score on some of those scoring chances and bring a physical edge. But the fact that he has yet to have a healthy season makes him another unreliable option.

Maybe the best hope of a depth offense is Vrana, who has the shooting talent this Blues roster craves. There’s inconsistency there too, and he’s a defensive liability. But he’s someone worth maximizing because he has the highest offensive ceiling of the three. Peak Vrana came in 2019-20, and that’s the season to try and replicate. To get there, the winger’s usage has to be managed so he’s not overly exposed in his minutes. Ideally, he’s paired with a playmaker, too (which St. Louis has a number of).

Vrana has the best chance at becoming a secondary scorer and providing an offensive spark from the middle six. But if the Blues want to push toward the playoffs, management has to compose a more dependable supporting cast. Kapanen and Blais likely aren’t it.

The best case

We’re wrong — the Blues are amazing again, breaking models everywhere with their creative offense led by elite seasons from Thomas and Kyrou. The defense corps is stable enough and a return to form from Binnington pushes the Blues back into the playoffs.

The worst case

A dead-cat bounce where the Blues don’t make the playoffs, but aren’t quite weak enough to fall to the league’s lottery. Stagnant seasons from Thomas and Kyrou lead to further doubt about each player’s ability to lead the franchise forward.

The bottom line

As tricky as it may have been to maneuver around some self-inflicted contract-related roadblocks, the Blues didn’t do themselves many favors this offseason. St. Louis doesn’t look much better than where it left off in 2022-23. And its current trajectory ahead is less than inspiring.

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While the pressure is on the players to rebound from last year’s disappointment, attention has to be on management, too. The Blues have to be honest about what they are when the season gets underway and figure out where to go from here to avoid another stagnant, wasted season.

References

How these projections work

Understanding projection uncertainty 

Resources

Evolving Hockey

Natural Stat Trick

Hockey Reference

NHL

All Three Zones Tracking by Corey Sznajder

Read the other 2023-24 season previews here.

(Photo of Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou: Jason Mowry / Getty Images)

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