ST. LOUIS — Discipline is often described as a practice of training people to obey rules, or behaving in a certain manner, using some form of punishment to fix such disobedience.
In hockey terms, lack of discipline is often translated to penalties, and for the Blues, who completed their round-robin portion of the NHL Return to Play Plan with three losses (0-2-1) to drop them to the No. 4 seed in the Western Conference, discipline was an issue.
They took 17 minor penalties in all and were shorthanded 16 times in those three games, allowing three power-play goals, and what irked coach Craig Berube most was that of the 16 times shorthanded, nine of those were stick infractions (slashing, tripping, hooking) and three more came as a result of a lack of skating (interference or holding).
Against the Vancouver Canucks, the Blues' opponent in the Western Conference first-round, those penalties could prove costly.
As well as the Blues' power play ranked (24.3 percent) during the regular season, which was good for third in the NHL, the young, vibrant Canucks were right there behind them at 24.2 percent, fourth in the league.
And considering the Blues were 18th during the regular season on the penalty kill at 79.3 percent, those numbers don't add up to a tremendous amount of success.
Bottom line: spend too much time in the sin bin, and it could play a major factor in who prevails in this best-of-7 series that begins Wednesday.
"Yeah, that's going to be a big focus for us is being disciplined," Blues center Ryan O'Reilly said. "These last round-robin games, we haven't really found that. We know we're going up against a great power play. It starts with that, staying out of the box. If we can do that, it's tougher. Their best players aren't handling the puck as much. It's definitely a focus for us. It's a very good team over there and it's going to be difficult either way, but it's definitely a staple that we have to have."
The Blues can live with certain types of penalties, but not what Berube would call "easy" penalties.
"Their power play's really good," Berube said of the Canucks. "They've got some high-end shooters on their power play, with (Quinn) Hughes on the back end. We haven't been disciplined yet and going forward here starting the first game against Vancouver, we need to be a disciplined hockey team. We've got to do a much better job of getting rid of the slashing penalties and the hookings and things like that. Those are easy penalties. We shouldn't be taking those penalties. We can accept taking away a scoring chance or things like that or physicality at times, getting calls for that, but this hooking and tripping and holding and stuff like that, we've got to get rid of those."
The Blues were able to hold Vancouver to 1-for-12 with the man-advantage in the three games during the regular season. The Blues, on the other hand, were 0-for-9 on the power play, so scoring with the man-advantage could hold the key to the series.