Quoting: CMcAvoy73
Granted i haven’t seen a ton of the blues this year, but isn’t Faulk playing alright? He’s getting like 24 minutes a night.
Quoting: Ragsandbluesfan
Hes been really good, like living up to his contract good
Quoting: RClay321
yes he is playing decent this year, however they need to dump that contract imo. Sanford is not much of a payment
He started off playing really well, but he's fallen back to earth to being about fine to below average. He has five points in the last 25 games, sporting 20.31 expected goals against while putting up 15.43 expected goals for the Blues. In layman's terms, that is a player who is helping generate enough high quality chances that would likely result in fifteen goals for the Blues while hurting his team enough to allow other teams to generate high quality chances that would likely result in twenty goals against the Blues.
Part of this is that he's almost certainly being overplayed- Krug has taken a hit in his advanced stats as well, because these are guys that shouldn't be playing 24 minutes a night- and it's not his fault that he's being overplayed. But part of it is that he was way overperforming to start that season, regressing (in a good way) from being insanely bad last year to being a Norris caliber guy for about two months before regressing (in a bad way) back to the mean of being maybe a fine defenseman, but probably one that is below average, which is where we're at right now. Super excited for the Blues to definitely protect him in the expansion draft and lose Dunn (one way or another).
I've been very consistent this season that you just can't trust that he's suddenly going to be an elite defenseman, or even a particularly good one, at 28 after not having been that his entire career to this point and coasting on a reputation of putting up points on bad Hurricanes teams. And much like we should have done with Sanford last year, you gotta sell high when other GMs are stupid enough to bite on what is clearly an outlying year. Unfortunately, Faulk's NTC will probably hurt their chances of doing that, and honestly the Blues might not even be smart enough to try since they weren't smart enough to realize he's not that good when they gave him that contract in the first place.