from Scott Burnside of ESPN,

Many observers liked the Blues to take another step forward with a long playoff run next spring. Some, including this scribe, liked the Blues to use last season's successes to catapult themselves to the franchise's first Stanley Cup championship, much like what Los Angeles did last season.

Forward T.J. Oshie and defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk admitted that hearing and reading those kinds of predictions might have seeped into the Blues' subconscious after the lockout ended.

"We've come to expect our game to show up a little bit too much" as opposed to working to produce the level of play that marked the Blues' of last season, Shattenkirk said.

One of the team's bright lights on the blue line, Shattenkirk noted that consistently good teams never assume they will be good again just because history suggests it will be so.

"They don't carry that with them. They leave what happened behind them," he said.

The Blues need to learn that whatever accolades they received as a result of last season are worthless now. That shouldn't be too hard after the past couple of weeks. Still, for some of the Blues, this is uncharted territory. Under Hitchcock, who took over 13 games into last season, the Blues never lost more than two games in regulation at any point in the season and that happened only once.

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