Remember when the Blues were hard to play against? This team just doesn't have that quality. Saying that, the teams we had that were hard to play against were big and physical, but there is more than one way to do that.
We're not really a big, physical team, so we are rarely able to create a dominant cycle game in the offensive zone (though sometimes we do see this from our 4th line) and we can get pushed around at times in the defensive zone. We have some skilled players, but when we play a really skilled team it shows how much we're not that. Our skilled guys can make plays, but we generally lack the crisp tape-to-tape passing you need as a counter-attack team, and we are generally the opposite of opportunistic when it comes to slot chances and chances in tight, typically dusting pucks or waiting for screens, only to have shots blocked or getting stick-on-sticked because we wasted too much time. Man, I feel like I've been saying that last part for 15 years.
I think we will see a lot in the next 15-18 months in terms of carving out the identity of the "new core". If we're going to play a fast and counter-attacking style, we need more skilled players, more shooters, and quite a bit of skills development around moving and protecting pucks. On the back end, while I generally agree that we need to find more guys that can defend well in our zone, I think we have just as big of a need for guys like Leddy (only better) who can generate quick retrievals and get the puck out of our zone and back up the ice. We get none/one-and-done(-ed) way too much on offense, but we also need to be doing that to our opponents more efficiently.
I think we're set for the foreseeable future in the goalie department, but there is a lot of pruning and identity seeking that needs to be done in terms of the 18 skaters that suit up every night.
