Hitting guys doesn't put you in position to speed up and down the ice, which is more our style right now.I wish the Blues would hit more
I'm really, really hoping we purposely took it easy on the physical play during the regular season so we didn't get too worn down and we plan on ramping up the physicality big time in the playoffs. We absolutely have the tools to beat down on speedy/small teams and it seems that throughout the regular season we've passed up the opportunity to do so.
Kyrou is the only regular roster player that concerns me if a series gets physical/tight checking. Pretty much every other player is big/physical or they've proven they have the skill/feistiness to get through a tough series (Krug, Thomas, O'Reilly, Walker, Saad). Not many teams in the West can ice a highly skilled team that is big and can also play physical. Calgary? Maybe Colorado? Vegas who is probably going to miss the playoffs? The list is short.
Nearly all of Minnesota's star players are relatively little guys. Here are their top 3 forwards and their top defenseman:
Fiala - 5'10"
Kaprizov - 5'10"
Zuccarello - 5'8"
Spurgeon - 5'9"
None of these guys are big, and the most physical player here is actually Kaprizov.
I think the size difference is a big reason we've dominated them in recent years. We have several guys that are in our top 9/top 4 that are big and/or physical. Parayko, Faulk, Buchnevich, Schenn, Barbashev, Perron, Tarasenko...all these guys are key players and they can all play a heavy style if needed. If we play a physical game against Minnesota, they're in trouble.
We're still one of the bigger teams, which should be beneficial even if we aren't focused on hitting since in theory we should be able to absorb physicality better than most.
Changing the formula that's given us the most success isn't a good idea going into the playoffs, but it is true we don't know for sure how things might look different there yet.
Anyway Dom had a great article on the Athletic about this one week ago: "Examining the ‘heavy hockey’ trend and whether it’s the only path to a Stanley Cup"
It includes an interesting chart that shows the Blues this year are the heaviest team in the playoffs, but also one of the least physical. The "Heavy" number is just based off weight and "physicality" is a combination of how often the players hit their opponents and get hit by their opponents, using only road games to prevent scorer bias.
Apparently every conference finalist since 2018 was in the top right quadrant or just outside of it, so in recent years size and physicality have been important. Going back to 2010, though, there are a lot more teams with that success in the other quadrants.
Numbers also show that while every player performs worse than their regular season level in the playoffs thanks to the stronger competition, the bottom 5 percentile players in size and physicality have performed at a level significantly lower than that. The obvious poster childs for that are Gaudreau and Marner, but of relevance to the Blues upcoming series, Spurgeon and Zuccarello were also singled out as guys who have been in that bucket.
