The Need to Knows
- The Time: 5pm PT
- The Place: Enterprise Center, St. Louis, Missouri
- Place to Watch: KHN, KONG, Amazon Prime (in-market), FanDuel SportsNet-Midwest
- Place to Listen: KJR 93.3-FM via Kraken Audio Network
Know Your Enemy
- The St. Louis Blues have a record of 26-26-6, which is good for 58 points in the standings. That’s all good for 11th in the Conference, and 6th in the Central Division.
- Jordan Kyrou and Rob Thomas are the beating heart of the Blues’ offense; Kyrou has 46 points in 58 games, and Thomas has 45 points in 46 games.
- Kyrou also happens to lead the Blues in goals; with 23 in 58.
- The Blues have a less than stellar power play, but an atrocious penalty kill; they currently fall at 29th overall in the league.
- Jordan Binnington is the man who’s seen the most play time in net for the Blues, and he has a .898 SV% in 39 starts to show for it. Joel Hofer meanwhile has a .903 SV% on 19 starts.
Game Preview
It has been a while since the Kraken last played St. Louis at the very beginning of the season. It feels like an eternity has passed since here and now, and both teams have changed and suffered so much since that game.
So, what’s been happening in the land of Busch while Seattle has gone and had it’s fair share of tribulations? Further tribulations!
St. Louis since Seattle’s last meeting with them settled into being a deeply mediocre team that lets the play come to them rather than control much of it themselves, they sit at 24th in the league at every possession-based analytic, and have a penalty kill that, to put it kindly, reeks. They do have deeper scoring than you’d expect, but it never seems to be clicking at anything more than a leisurely pace, and a lot of it seems to run directly through Jordan Kyrou and Robert Thomas. They’ve canned their old coach and brought in former Boston coach Jim Montgomery to hopefully right things, which I think has resulted in a pretty up and down improvement from where they were. Their defense is a heady mix of ancient and kind of bad, and of course…we would be remiss to not mention Jordan Binnington; Mister “I told you so” if you happen to be Canadian, who outside of playing with a stacked-to-the-gills team is still not exactly a great goaltender in 2025.
Of course, they just dropped three unanswered goals on Colorado in a win on Sunday and took the Jets to overtime on Saturday. So maybe they’ve gotten the boost they needed from Colton Parayko and Binnington getting to be 4 Nations champs.
This will be an interesting test of a game; if the Kraken attack the puck like they should, they will almost certainly get a goal or two; St. Louis’ defense and netminding has been a big part of their inability to stay in a playoff spot. the biggest issue they will struggle with is A) those comebacks St. Louis seems pretty good at staging, and B) whether or not they can truly take advantage of St. Louis’ achilles heel; a very bad penalty kill. With many of the league’s playoff-bound teams looking to take their pick of the two squads, there’s incentive for the Kraken to not just get up on any opportunity provided to them by the Blues, but keep them pinned there until the final horn sounds.
LET’S GO KRAKEN, LET’S GO SQUIDS