So many what-ifs.
What if Blues coach Ken Hitchcock had pulled goaltender Jake Allen after he gave up a should've-had goal early in the first?
What if the shot by Blues forward Chris Porter had gone in during the second period before the play was whistled dead?
The only thing that's not in question: The Blues are going home again for the third consecutive year after a Game 6 loss in the first round. The Wild defeated them 4-1 on Saturday in a game the Blues seemed to have as little fun playing as fans did watching.
The Wild scored early and timely goals, one at 7:14 in the first and another at 11:19 in the second, before the Blues were even on the board. Both goals were poor enough that Allen, the Blues' rookie goaltender, got pulled; one was a shorthanded chance for the Wild by Zach Parise, who shot almost parallel to the Blues' net and managed to thread the puck through the space Allen allowed between himself and the post. The second Wild goal, from Justin Fontaine, beat Allen five-hole.
"Two terrible goals again. I just let us down," Allen told reporters postgame. "I was more focused today than I ever was all year. Just two bad goals that can't go in at this time of year."
Meanwhile, the only goal the Blues could muster in an elimination game came with four seconds left in the second period. Defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk whipped the puck toward the net from the point, and forward T.J. Oshie, part of the melee the Blues had created near the net, beat Wild goaltender Devan Dubnyk.
One goal in an elimination game is a difficult pill to swallow for a team of the Blues' caliber. And it was only their second goal in their past two games.
"You can't expect to score two goals and win valuable games," forward Steve Ott admitted to reporters postgame.
It's going to be a long offseason.
HAT TRICK
• No jump from the start. If the Blues learned anything from the first five games, it should have been that nothing short of a 60-minute effort would beat Dubnyk. Even when they got to Dubnyk in the first period, it hadn't assured them victory, but not scoring on him at all in the opening 20 minutes has guaranteed them defeat every time this series. Considering that trend, it's baffling that they allowed the Wild to outshoot them 10-4 in the first period. The Blues eventually clawed their way back in the shots-on-goal department, outshooting the Wild 31-21 by the end of the third period, but overall, the Wild won the battle for the middle of the ice, which gave the Blues little chance of pulling off a comeback.
• Special teams stumble. It was an awkward reversal of roles for the Blues' special teams units Sunday from their Game 5 performance, when they scored on the power play and stumbled once on the penalty kill. This time, their penalty kill was perfect, and it was their power play that surrendered a goal, which came within the game's first 10 minutes. Meanwhile, the Blues' extra-man unit went 0 for two, and that's not including their six-man effort late in the third after pulling their goaltender. Inability to score on the power play might not have won or lost them the game, but having it become a liability by giving up a shorthanded goal was disastrous.
• Not the scapegoat: It's easy to pin this loss on Allen, who gave up two soft goals (and made some great saves in between) before getting pulled during the second period for Brian Elliott. The second goal came almost immediately after Hitchcock assured the NBC broadcast crew during a rinkside interview that he hadn't thought of pulling Allen after giving up one. Elliott, who hadn't seen game action in over two weeks, gave up one goal at the beginning of the third to Parise. Taken together, the Blues' goaltenders gave up three goals on 20 shots. Certainly, it was not a banner night for the tandem.
But from the beginning of this series to its untimely end, this has been a team failure.
Goaltending certainly didn't lose Games 1 and 3. And it wasn't just Allen who stumbled Sunday; Kevin Shattenkirk and Vladimir Tarasenko each missed the chance for a key check on their respective shifts -- they opted to try to reach for the puck instead, and were egregiously unsuccessful -- that could have stymied two of the Wild's successful scoring chances. That's not to make Shattenkirk and Tarasenko -- the two highest-scoring players for the Blues this postseason -- the scapegoats, either. But if the Blues ever want to get out of the first round, it will take far more effort from every player on the ice to reverse a long trend of coming up short in the postseason.
#StLBlues only remaining 1967 expansion team not to win #StanleyCup.
— Ken Schott (@slapschotts) April 26, 2015
You can follow Elisabeth Meinecke on Twitter at @lismeinecke or email her at ecmeinecke@gmail.com.
