Well, we're 10 games into the season, and I think we can draw some early conclusions. All stats I talk about are from Naturalstattrick - filtered for miniumum 35 minutes at 5v5.
1. Most of our new players are having a positive effect. Army spent assets and money fairly wisely this off-season. Broberg, Holloway, Suter, Faksa, and the forward Joseph have all had varying degrees of success. Texier and the defensman Joseph, less so.
2. We are still in desperate need of play drivers/talent. The only players on our team with an xGF% over 50% are Thomas (62.07) Holloway (53.41) and M. Joseph (The forward - at 51.77). Everyone else is under 50%. As a team the Blues are once again near the bottom in all advanced metrics - xGF% we rank 25th at 47.00, SCF% we rank 25th at 46.78, and HDSCF% we rank 23rd at 46.74. This is the second or third straight year where we are rarely carrying play.
3. We also lack finishing talent, something that helped counter our poor underlying metrics in prior years. However, so far through 10 games our High-Danger shooting % ranks 24th at 14.75% and our overall shooting % is 20th, at 8.23.
4. Special teams are brutal. We rank 21st on the PP with multiple SH goals against/goals that happend within 20 seconds of the penalty ending, and we have a bottom 5 PK.
To sum it all up - we don't carry play at 5v5, we don't have enough finishing talent to offset the issue, and our special teams are an anchor, not a bouy.
Most of the things that went extremely right for us last year have (naturally) regressed. Last year we were incredibly healthy (Nope), had possibly the 2nd or 3rd best tandem goaltending in the league (We're must closer to league average at this point), and our OT record was incredible (That part has carried over, at least so far).
Other random notes:
1. The Buch center experience is a failure. I love Buch, but he has no business as a Center. His hockey card stats look reasonable, but he's also on a massive PDO bender, and his faceoff win % is simply atrocious.
2. Schenn continues to regress defensively. He has the highest xGA/60 of anyone on the team not named Texier (Who is WOOF defensively), without extreme defensive usage. For comparison, M. Joseph has slighly more defensive usage then Schenn, yet has a .75 better xGA/60 rate.
3. Kyrou has two goals, that he scored in the same game. We need more goals out of him on a more consistent basis.
Unless some drastic changes occur, it's going to be a long season fellas.
