Sharks at Blues preview: Fix it

I won’t lie, I fell asleep after one period of Tuesday night’s 3-2 loss to the Arizona Coyotes, and apparently, so did the Blues.

Who’s Barrett Hayton? Who knows, but he scored twice on Jordan Binningon. Despite being fully staffed save for Brayden Schenn, and despite Scott Perunovich’s debut on the same night that Oskar Sundqvist returned, it appears that the Blues couldn’t dig deep enough to muster the effort to beat a team in the league that, before Tuesday, had exactly one win and three points.

You would think that a weekend full of moral victories, but still losses, would’ve kickstarted the Blues to take out an easily beatable team and right the ship, but nope.

Tonight, the San Jose Sharks are in town. The Sharks are 8-6-1, with their most recent victory coming on Tuesday night against the Minnesota Wild. While it’s nice of the Sharks to take care of a divisional opponent for the Blues, it would be even nicer if San Jose decided to take a night off.

The Blues won the teams’ previous game 4-2 at the SAP Center, and could send the Sharks home with a losing roadtrip record tonight. Here’s hoping that the knot that head coach Craig Berube has jerked into their asses during practice has stuck. You don’t lose four games in a row and stay at status quo, regardless of why you’ve lost. It could be covid-brain, it could be your first game back from injury, it could be your first NHL game. Whatever the reason, the Blues need some top notch performances from their players tonight. Something that looks to be fixed after far more than four poor showings is that the defensive pair of Marco Scandella and Colton Parayko are no more. Scandella skated yesterday on the third pairing with Robert Bortuzzo, and Parayko was paired at the top with Torey Krug.

Whether or not that snaps them out of their funk will remain to be seen.