Is something wrong with Ryan O’Reilly?
There’s a decent case to be made that Ryan O’Reilly was a borderline MVP candidate for the Blues this season.
After being traded by Buffalo this past summer, he put up career highs with 28 goals and 77 points, logging big minutes, dominating in possession, and absolutely crushing opponents at the faceoff dot like few people in the league can.
He was easily a top-10 skater by WAR this season and if he shows up on more than a few Hart ballots at the end of the year, that would only be fair.
He didn’t do a ton of scoring against Winnipeg in the first round, but he got the hard matchups and even bigger minutes than normal (averaging 21:42 a night with only one OT game mixed in). Despite the expanded role, he still drove shot quality (almost 58 percent expected-goals in all situations) if not scoring (St. Louis was outscored 7-6 when he was on the ice). It happens, and his low PDO wasn’t a reflection of his quality of play.
What’s interesting, though, is that the thing he was really good at all year, faceoffs, weren’t exactly his strong suit. He went plus-11 on 159 draws, which is 53.5 percent. Certainly respectable but a bit of a step back from what you’d expect of a guy whose career number is 55.3 percent. Call it variance in a small sample and that’s fine.
But now there are concerns that he’s perhaps playing injured, or otherwise just physically out of gas, because in this second round, the Blues’ outfield MVP has been pushed around pretty convincingly. And shockingly, it begins at the dot.
O’Reilly has his points — four in four games — but at the dot he’s already minus-19 on 123 faceoffs. That’s 42.2 percent and includes a night when he went just 9 of 26 in Game 4. More specifically, after a slight positive (16 of 31) in the series opener, he’s been losing more than winning at the dot in every game of the series.
Worth noting, too, that all those points against the Stars are assists, as Vladimir Tarasenko fills the net with his lethal shot. The other stuff O’Reilly is good at aren’t really showing up either. The Blues are getting badly out-attempted when he’s on the ice in all situations, which is a concern for a guy who spends slightly more time on the power play than killing off Dallas’s. The Blues have also been outscored 6-5 with O’Reilly on the ice, and this time it’s no fluke. In fact, you might consider him lucky: His xGF% is just 37.7 in this series.
That’s because the Blues are positively bleeding chances on the PK (16 total chances, and seven high-danger) but even at 5-on-5, it’s 32 and 16 in about an hour of ice time. These are shockingly bad numbers; in the regular season, when O’Reilly was incredible, the Blues allowed just 25.3 scoring chances and 9.9 high-dangers per 60 minutes of full-strength hockey. Those are increases of about 26 percent and 61 percent, respectively.
Some of that, you can say, is the fact that the Seguin line is absolutely going off on him. But he played top comp in the regular season and handled those guys easily. Maybe, then, his struggles at the dot are a canary in the coal mine.
This isn’t to say O’Reilly is the Blues’ only problem, of course. The fact that Jay Bouwmeester is third on the team in ice time despite getting absolutely buried by the Stars’ best players was something you could have seen coming a mile away. Things went much better in Game 4, at least by process, but he was also on the ice for three goals against, two of which were at 5-on-5.
And the Blues’ depth players are simply getting crushed as well. Robby Fabbri’s xGF% starts with a “34,” and Ivan Barbashev and Alex Steen haven’t fared all that much better (both starting with a “40”). David Perron hasn’t done much. Brayden Schenn isn’t moving the needle at all either.
Sure, these were mostly guys where you never figured they’d be relied-upon players. By and large they had fine regular seasons, but you were never going to think they would make or break the Blues’ chances. If anything, you hoped they would just not get scored on too much and the good news is that even while they’re getting badly outshot on the ice, the Stars aren’t scoring much when they’re out there. Maybe that’s all you can ask for.
But O’Reilly, you figured, would be a key cog. He hasn’t been. And we’ve all seen guys hit a wall and inexplicably underperform only to reveal they were playing with a broken hand or ligament tear at the end of the season.
That would certainly explain O’Reilly’s problems against the Stars, because the alternative theory — that he’s just overmatched all of a sudden — doesn’t make a lot of sense and certainly doesn’t flatter him after such a great year.
Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
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