For St. Louis Blues, Harsh Reality Is They Must Change One Aspect More Than Any Early In A Season

It never happened.

“Disappointing I would say,” Blues general manager Doug Armstrong said. “I thought we were, based on the second half of last season and then the playoffs, I thought we had progressed to a spot where we would be more competitive out of the gate. Obviously our first half of the season was not to the standard that we had hoped for, made us re-assess our short term and maybe medium-term plans, not our long-term plans. I would say that I thought that we would be a better team.”

Coach Jim Montgomery added, “Poor start, and then I would say not being able to find solutions early enough to be able to get on the right path was very frustrating, for everybody involved, and we all need to be significantly better. We all need to change and affect change within ourselves, and that’s not easy to do, whether it’s your training habits, it’s your attitude, it’s your mindset. All of those things need to be different for us to get off to a better start. It’s two years in a row that I’ve been accustomed to what’s happened here. I don’t know what happened in the two years prior to that, but they were non-playoff years as well. Getting off to a better start and trying to find the attitudes and the mindsets that we’ve had in the last two months of the season in the last two years, not because of results, but because the mindsets and the attitudes were significantly different.”

Montgomery used a word there that’s key to everything: attitude.

Why is it that this particular group, and it likely won’t look exactly the same as the one that ended the season against the Utah Mammoth, doesn’t view October-January games like it does February-April?

Those games mean the same on Oct. 28 mean exactly the same as the ones played on April 5, and that’s attitude, and until that changes, the Blues are going to be the same group that disappoints early, gets the fans’ hopes up late, only to more times than not, come up short.

“Attitude’s the most important thing,” Montgomery said. “All of us have to be willing to do the right things on a consistent level and it’s got to be an attitude of, I believe it’s a Truman quote that it’s not who gets the praise but it’s the common good of the group that succeeds. It doesn’t matter who gets the credit for the success. It matters who’s doing the work together to create the success, and that needs to be the attitude by everybody, and I’m not just talking players.

“I don’t care of you drive the Zamboni. Drive the Zamboni the best way that you can and make sure you don’t miss a line. Those are the kind of attitudes that we’ve got to make sure everyone’s having.”

Armstrong agreed.

“Yeah, there has to be a reckoning of what happened and how it happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said. “I’m not talking about the wins and losses, it’s just our attitude of how we came to work every day. I shared with some people today, the groups that I have worked with that have had success loved the grind. They loved the challenge. They loved the adversity. They couldn’t wait for it. They thrived under it. They wanted someone to punch them in the mouth so they could respond. That’s what you’re seeing (from) 16 teams playing now that had that and we are not one of them today.”

So how do they change it?

“I think it’s preparation, but I think guys got to truly sink into that,” said Blues forward Dylan Holloway, who ripped off 34 points (14 goals, 20 assists) the final 25 games of the season. “It’s not that guys aren’t prepared, per se. Everybody’s working all summer, everyone’s training hard, but I think more mentally, it’s kind of like, ‘OK, we start on this day’ like mentally. I think mentally we’ve got to take it back a little bit and truly like be mentally prepared for the season because like you said, we got off to two slow starts. But for me, it’s not like this team doesn’t have the capability to be an elite team, to be a playoff team. It’s just kind of finding that consistency more and the start’s huge.”

The Blues never had more than a four-game winning streak this past season. That’s part of the consistency that was missing for large swaths. Last season, they were the last team to reel off a three-game winning streak. This season, they never won more than two games in a row until the first of three four-game streaks starting March 1-6.

The harsh reality of having to sit at Enterprise Center this past Saturday and think about why they failed really set in.

“I think it starts with training camp,” Armstrong said. “And it’s going to be interesting because we’re all going into a new training camp format. We’re down to four (preseason) games, it’s two weeks, there’s a lot of pressure on the players to show up in great shape. The nagging training camp injuries you see are going to bleed into the first and second week of the season now. So players are going to have to skate harder in the summer, they’re going to have to take care of themselves, they’re going to have to have leadership practices that are almost NHL practices. You can’t have sore groins and sore backs like you could when Bernie [Federko] was playing. You have to show up ready, so I think that’s going to be a main focus and then I think respecting the league. Understand that it’s a very difficult league and if you’re not prepared mentally and physically to play, you’re going to fall back and I think our mental toughness has to improve. Our ability to turn the page quickly, I think we hung onto things organizationally too long and they dragged into the second game, the third game, and then I think we didn’t get grounded quick enough after a couple of wins. It felt like it took us five years to win multiple games in a row there for a while. We didn’t have that mental resolve that playoff-caliber teams have.”

Montgomery wasn’t around for the off-season going into the 2024-25 season but was last year. It was his first full camp as the coach and understands when players report, there will be no easing into camp.

“There’s a couple of things you can do. I’ve always been a coach that looks to get the team off to a … pace is really important in camp, I’m just talking about training camp,” Montgomery said. “I think training camp bleeds into … players got to do their work to be in great shape and be ready to go and having done improvements in their games on their own in the summer because they’re not under our guide at that time. When you start the year, training camp, I always believe you build the whole, which means five-man groups and you get off to pace and you start to build the details and habits within that. The finer points, they have to teach individuals. You build that as you go along. So you start with a whole, then you build the small parts, and then you go back to the whole. That has usually driven a lot of success, but I would say my last two training camps, that hasn’t happened. So now I’m going to be looking at those habits and details starting with the small parts and that requires a lot more gruntwork, a lot more grind on the players. It means camp’s going to be harder, but that’s the way it needs to be. We need to change things in order … to affect change, you need to change. So that’s the things I’m looking at to affect change.

“After being done with the year-end meetings with the players and getting their perspective on some of the questions that you guys are asking, I’m asking them pointedly, ‘What will they do to affect change?’ I told you guys that. Then I’ve got to start looking for assistant coaches. Then it’s going to be working a lot with ‘Steener’ on how we see the team, not only playing, how we’re going to make our team have a better camp. All those things, him and I need to discuss ad nauseum because it’s really important that we have a great summer. In order to have a great start, you have to have a great summer. It starts right away. For us, that’s this week.”

The players get the long off-season to reflect but they’ve really got to dig into it and understand that the status quo isn’t nearly good enough.

“I think we’ve all got to really reflect on it,” said Blues forward Robert Thomas, who also ended the season on fire with 31 points (14 goals, 17 assists) in 22 games. “Obviously it’s been something that’s happened the last two years in a row. I think a lot of opinions and stuff should be kept private and handled inside. After those conversations happen, I think we can all come together and kind of voice our opinions and plans on how we’re going to change that.”

And just just change one thing, it’s change plenty, because early this season, goaltending was poor, defensive play was poor, the offense was lacking consistency and special teams were bad.

“Obviously everybody strives to get into the playoffs and go for a run,” Blues defenseman Philip Broberg said. “Obviously sitting here, it’s disappointing. We didn’t get (off) to a good start to the season and then we kind of got going. But I think it was pretty disappointing to not make the playoffs for sure.”

But as much as the Blues need to change with their attitude towards Game 1 to 84 – yes, 84 next season, Holloway wants to make one thing clear.

“Our culture in the room is amazing,” he said. “I feel like everybody’s friends with everybody, everybody talks to everybody. The guys go for dinner with everybody. It’s a rare thing to have as tight of a group as we do. It was weird like that to start. I feel like everybody thought that we were going to get off to a hot start and it was just going to continue from where we were last year and then when that didn’t happen, it was kind of a shock to everyone. It took us a little bit to get it back together and then when we did, you can see how good hockey that we did play. I think the goal going into next season is to find that right away.”

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