How The Front Office Failed

I wrote this Saturday night. Like Brad, I just knew. The fact that the Blues out shot the Hawks in Game 6 (as well as the series as a whole) just makes their over-estimation of Miller all the more obvious.

Mistakes in construction of the team.

There are two basic ways to win hockey games. One is to out-shoot your opponent. The other is to out-goaltend your opponent. The second may work at times but is not a recipe for sustained success (ask any Leafs fan). Unfortunately for the Blues, the best teams in shot differential are in the Western Conference. The road out of the Central Division certainly runs through Chicago. The road out of the Western Conference also goes through LA or San Jose. Looking at Shots Against, the Blues look pretty good.

Team	SA	NHL Rank
Los Angeles Kings	2150	2
St. Louis Blues	2163	3
Chicago Blackhawks	2229	4
San Jose Sharks	2282	6
Anaheim Ducks	2354	9

But Shots For shows the Blues in the bottom third of the league.

Team	SF	NHL Rank
San Jose Sharks	2851	1
Chicago Blackhawks	2717	3
Los Angeles Kings	2595	7
Anaheim Ducks	2569	8
St. Louis Blues	2403	22

Net Shots is positive, but the three teams above the Blues are the teams they would likely need to beat to advance to the SCF and the gap is a big one.

Team	Net Shots	NHL Rank
San Jose Sharks	569	1
Chicago Blackhawks	488	2
Los Angeles Kings	445	3
St. Louis Blues	240	5
Anaheim Ducks	215	7

Faced with this choice, the Front Office chose the wrong option. They went with the option that, over the long haul, doesn't work. But then they compounded their mistake.

Mistakes in evaluation of players.

Steve Ott was a terrible acquisition. Stewart may be maddeningly inconsistent but at least once in a while he made a positive contribution. Ott was relentlessly awful. Not only was he the worst player on the Blues but, by some metrics, down the stretch he was the worst player in the league. There are two possibilities behind the acquisition of Ott, neither of which makes me happy. One is that no one on the Blues scouted Ott. The other, which is probably worse, it that someone watched him play and said "That's our guy". Either way I think somebody ought to lose their job.

Bad enough to have chosen the out-goaltend option. In acquiring Ott, they also managed to make their offense worse and put more pressure on the goalie's performance.

Ryan Miller is another huge evaluation mistake. If you decide to go the better goaltender route your goalie has to be a lot better than the other team's goalie.

Goalie	Career ES Save Percentage
Ryan Miller	0.923
Jaroslav Halak	0.925
Corey Crawford	0.924
Anttii Niemi	0.924
Jonathan Quick	0.923
Jonas Hiller	0.927

People may think Ryan Miller LOOKS like a great goaltender. Unfortunately, he doesn't FUNCTION like a great goaltender. Miller has an economy of motion. He looks calm compared to other goalies. In his case, calm and composed doesn't keep the puck out of the net.

Given the gap in shot differentials between the Blues and the teams above them, Miller would have to be elite level (0.930 – 0.931) just to bring the odds of the Blues winning a series up to 50:50. Miller just isn't that good.

I knew that. I'm not Urpo Ylönen , the Goalie Whisperer, in some mountain cave in Finland. I'm just some guy with a laptop. If I knew it, then people in the Front Office, who are being paid to know these things, should know it too. They didn't.