Blues' Hitchcock on team's poor defense: 'The alarm bell's going off'
St. Louis Blues coach Ken Hitchcock likes low-scoring games, and conservative reads. He's not seeing enough of either from his team in the early going this season.
"We’re not playing the right way," the seemingly frustrated head coach told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch following a 4-1 loss to the Vancouver Canucks on Thursday. "We made a heck of a run here playing the right way, no odd-man rushes, don’t force offense, don’t give the puck away and make hope-for plays offensively.
"We’ve had a shoot-first mentality that allowed us to be top five in the league in scoring goals," Hitchcock continued, "but we don’t want to play the right way. We want to play a different game right now. Until we buy into that, we’re going to have some rough water we have to go through."
In Hitchcock's estimation, the Blues' over-aggressiveness and recent inability to execute the conservative system that has made them an elite club is resulting in too many five-alarm scoring opportunities for their opponents.
"When you force offense and you play careless with the puck, when you have defensemen who want to play ahead of the forwards, you end up with a recipe for disaster," Hitchcock explained. "We’ve given up more odd-man rushes in six hockey games than we did in two months last year. You can’t win like that. The alarm bell’s going off."
One can imagine the sequence below in particular - and especially Jordan Leopold's ill-advised pinch that allowed the Canucks to go three-on-one the other way and score the go-ahead goal Thursday - was at the back of Hitchcock's mind during his post-game press conference:
The coach is an unquestioned tactical genius when it comes to defensive hockey, so it's tough to question his assessment of his club's struggles here. On the other hand, the evidence doesn't exactly back up Hitchcock's diagnosis in this case.
After all, the 2-3-1 Blues are permitting the second fewest shots against per game this season, and only six clubs are surrendering fewer goals per game. Meanwhile, only four clubs have proven as inept offensively in the first two weeks of the season.