from Tom Timmermann of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,

The St. Louis Blues right now know where they want to go and know how to get there. They just can’t seem to fit the two together.

The style of play that lifted them to the Stanley Cup last season has been absent from the team for a lot of the first eight games of the season. It’s not that it doesn’t exist anymore — they’ve shown healthy stretches of it so far — but the team still is awaiting a 60-minute effort. Over the past eight days, when those lapses in their game have shown up, sometimes for just a few minutes, they’ve been costly, leading to four straight losses.

“We’ve managed to get points and that sort of thing,” defenseman Jay Bouwmeester said Sunday, “but I think if anyone’s honest, we’re not playing very good. I think the good point is we recognize it and I think we can fix it. I don’t think it’s Xs and Os or anything like that. It’s more, buckling down and (having) the effort and getting back to the way we have to play. It’s a hard way to play. But I think we saw last year when we did commit to it it was very successful. It’s just a matter of getting back there.”

After a 5-2 loss to Montreal on Saturday, coach Craig Berube talked about the team not having the buy-in they have to have to be successful. He expanded on what he meant by that on Sunday.

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