I don’t think that Dom is a bad person or an ignorant one for not liking the Blues this year. Binner has had a rough couple of seasons. Saad wasn’t elite in CO. Parayko is coming off a throwaway season. Neal was hot garbage in Alberta and got bought out. Who the hell is Jake Neighbours? Too many guys on the wrong side of 30. I get why the algorithm wouldn’t like us.
But _that’s_ my gripe with most hockey models: overreliance on the past, regardless of context. Did we really bottom-out after the cup, or did we just not handle the pandemic very well? Did Parayko’s back heal? Do Neal, Saad, and Buch fit our play style better than their previous teams? How do they perform when surrounded by an entirely different lineup, and one that is a lot deeper? How does changing special teams deployment factor in? These things don’t get answered by the models. And that’s where on-the-ground context and background come in, right? Like if you could bet against Dom’s model, you’d have to take the over given what we know, right? The model is a really helpful tool that accounts for a ton of really important stuff, but you can’t just use it on its own, and nobody in their right mind would ask you to.
The problem to me, really, is that the National media doesn’t, and hasn’t ever, given a solitary shit about the Blues. The Post Dispatch writers that cover this team would rather be covering football or soccer, and neither seem to really be contributing in any meaningful way to the season’s narrative. The Blues don’t have a fan stats account like most other teams do, so we don’t have someone dedicated to interpreting the numbers from our perspective: it gets done for us. So I don’t think the problem is really the models, or the numbers, the problem is not having control of the narrative. And maybe that’s important, maybe it’s not, but I doubt as many Blues fans would be as skeptical of these types of things if there was someone out there speaking for us and interpreting things on our behalf.
