Three Takeaways From Blues' 5-2 Loss Against Canucks

ST. LOUIS – For the St. Louis Blues, the days keep slipping away, and the games are as well.

The recent run has not been good, and Monday was no exception.

Once again, the Blues fell behind early, and the Vancouver Canucks, a team the Blues are going toe-to-toe with around that second wild card from the Western Conference, came prepared .

Conor Garland scored twice, Pius Suter and Tyler Myers each had a goal and an assist, and the Canucks blitzed the struggling Blues 5-2 at Enterprise Center on Monday, sending St. Louis to its third straight loss, the fourth time this season they’ve lost at least three in a row. Remember, they’re the only team in the NHL not to win three in a row this season.

Dylan Holloway and Colton Parayko, who set a career-high with his 11th goal of the season, scored, and Jordan Binnington was pulled after giving up three goals on 18 shots in favor of Joel Hofer, who made 10 saves.

The Blues (23-24-4) fell a game under .500 and four points behind the Canucks (22-17-10).

“Not good enough in every area,” Blues coach Jim Montgomery said after falling to 14-12-3 since taking over as Blues coach. “Special teams, 5-on-5 play, D-zone, neutral zone, O-zone, coaching. We all weren’t good enough tonight. Not acceptable.”

Let’s look at Monday’s Three Takeaways:

* Another poor start – Brayden Schenn made his feelings known about individuals needing to come prepared to start hockey games following a loss against the Dallas Stars on Saturday. So has Montgomery, who cited earlier in the day Monday that maybe the Blues need to do something different to change up the routine of what they’re doing, or not doing, to start hockey games.

Montgomery said it’s going to be a process, and he better hope that’s right because for another game, those thoughts fell on deaf ears.

Just 2:52 into the game, the Blues were behind once again when Garland scored the first of two goals:

Three mistakes happened leading to the play. One, Brandon Saad lost a wall battle in the offensive zone and Canucks captain Quinn Hughes picked the puck off his stick, then Tyler Tucker tried a dangerous pinch that he got burned on, and three, Mathieu Joseph also tried to pinch near the wall by the blue line that Hughes chipped away turning the play into a 2-on-1, and Garland had a tap-in.

Bam, the Blues were once again down 1-0 and it’s the seventh time this season that the opposition scored on the first goal of the game, with Binnington surrendering four of them.

The Canucks played the game with a purpose, outshooting the Blues 12-4 and leading 2-0. But the Blues thought they had an equalizer when Tyler Tucker converted a pass from behind the net to the high slot that was immediately waved off for goalie interference.

TJ Luxmore flagged Dylan Holloway for goalie interference despite Hughes initially shoving Holloway into the crease, then cross-checking the Blues forward into Lankinen.

Montgomery challenged, and in this league, goalie interference challenges are so fickle, nobody knows what the rules are and how they should be interpreted.

Montgomery felt “it was dead wrong. I know when we challenge the league, it needs to be dead wrong. I thought it was. For the league’s decision, it was not and the refs explained it that way too, the way I just explained it to you.”

Montgomery explained that he was told that the officials felt Holloway was going into the crease on his own anyway, so they made the call.

Huh? How can you, as an official, assume something is going to happen? Even if it looks obvious, how about call what actually happens? Not base it off assumption.

But Montgomery admitted anyway that, “I made the mistake of challenging it. The ref’s explanation to me was that Holloway was going to skate into the crease no matter what, no matter whether he was pushed or not. I felt Holloway was trying to stop and got pushed once, and the second time pushed him into the goalie. But I made a mistake of challenging it and we got overruled on that.”

Holloway said of the first period, “It’s brutal. We need to stop doing that. We’re a good hockey team and I feel like it’s up to us to kind of grab this thing. It starts with our starts. We’re kind of putting ourselves in a hole every night. We’ve just got to be better prepared.”

But that overrule meant the first penalty kill of the night …

* Special teams was a disaster – And it leads into the second takeaway, and when Garland scored to make it 2-0 at 15:53 on a puck that squirted through Binnington and lay still behind him before Garland poked in the loose puck, it marked the fifth straight game the penalty kill has allowed a goal.

The Blues are 28th in the league on the PK (71.8 percent), which is woefully poor.

This one was not good because Brock Boeser was allowed to have an open look from the slot, but a shot that Binnington could have – and probably should have – had better rebound control of. Nonetheless, it’s a goal against, and that unit alone is 31st in the league at 50 percent (6-for-12).

“I think the penalty kill numbers show itself,” Montgomery said.

They also allowed a power-play goal by J.T. Miller that chased Binnington from the game that made it 3-0 at 8:26 of the second period on an absolutely dreadful line change; not so much by Mathieu Joseph but Tucker and woefully bad by Pavel Buchnevich:

As for the power-play, Holloway did score this beauty of a one-timer at 10:08 of the second to make it 3-1:

But with a chance at making it a one-goal game, or potentially tying it up after Nils Hoglander high-sticked Robert Thomas to give the Blues a four-minute power-play, they surrendered a Suter shorthanded goal at 12:36 of the second to fall behind 4-1 and for all intents and purposes, end the game:

Holloway did take responsibility for the goal against.

"That was tough. We can't be giving that up," Holloway said. "That one was on me. That was a bad turnover. I'm late in my shift. I can't be turning that puck over. That one was on me."

But for the game, the PK was 0-for-2, and the power play was 1-for-5.

“I thought the power play was building the right way,” Montgomery said. “Tonight was not a good night for the power play. We did get a goal, but we gave up a shorty on the four-minute power play.”

* Confidence is sorely lacking, leading to poor body language – When mistakes happen, shoulders slump, heads sling back, facial expressions can be seen. And they’re all in a negative light.

The body language of this team is really low right now. Coaches are at a loss, players are not helping their own cause. It’s causing plenty of negative discern right now.

“We’ve all been in those moments where the body language doesn’t look good, so we go through it as a team,” defenseman Cam Fowler said. ‘A lot of that just comes with frustration right now, which all of us are feeling. We have to own that, dig ourselves out of it, but if it starts creeping into the team, that’s when it becomes a problem. We have to address that right away and just know that there’s going to be hard parts during a season, during a game and we have to collectively kind of help one another dig ourselves out of it.”

The coaching staff is preparing this particular group to perform on a nightly basis, and at some point, especially these veterans who are on their third head coach how, have to take responsibility and perform at an adequate level, but Montgomery is taking plenty of responsibility.

“I’m always going to think it’s a team thing and I’m always going to look in a mirror first,” he said. “And I’ll talk to the team tomorrow on what I think we have to do as a group to be better at.

“(The body language) is something we need to improve upon as well.”