Fred Kfoury III/Icon Sportswire via AP Photos
NHL: MAY 29 Stanley Cup Final - Blues at Bruins
The St. Louis Blues during Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final
The following essay appears in the forthcoming July issue as part of our annual A-List Awards. For their remarkable comeback from last in the NHL to playing in the Stanley Cup Final, SLM has named the Blues the 2019 "Team of the Year."
This was impossible. Not just because it was the first time in 49 years that the Blues had last played for Lord Stanley’s cup. Not just because in those ensuing decades, we had redefined futility, making a record 38 playoff appearances (including 25 in a row) that all fizzled, often heart-wrenchingly, short of reaching the final. But on January 3 of this year, the team was dead last in the league—not worst in the Central Division, but actually locked in the basement of the entire National Hockey League.
Only four teams with as many losses through its first 41 games had ever even made the playoffs, and none of them had made it out of the first round. In this city, the postseason heroics are the job of its legendary baseball team. St. Louis miracles don’t take place on ice.
That historical lack of hockey success has belied the fact that St. Louis is, at its core, a great hockey town. Of course, when check comes to shove, the Cardinals still hold sway in so-called Baseball Heaven. But sweater-clad fans still pack the Enterprise Center, with turnouts regularly in the top half of league attendance. And from the moment the Blues showed up as an expansion team, in 1967, the national sport of the north has slowly seeped into our Midwestern consciousness. These days, you’re as likely to see kids playing in-line in the park or slapping pucks and balls into nets on the neighborhood streets and cul-de-sacs as playing catch. In 2016, five St. Louis–area hockey players were picked up in the first round of the NHL draft, and 14 of the 22 locals who have played in the league skated this year. We may bleed red, but if you look closely, our veins show blue.
With that birthright comes disappointment. After all, the team made the finals in each of its first three seasons of existence—and was promptly swept each time. Since the 1990s, despite a cavalcade of stars that includes Hull, Fuhr, MacInnis, Shanahan, and Pronger, the Blues have statistically been the most disappointing team in hockey, sixth most underperforming in all of sports. And we watched each of those star players win championships elsewhere.
So we were unimpressed in November when, after the miserable start, we fired our coach and promoted Craig Berube, a career NHL enforcer with less than two years of NHL head coaching experience. But in January, we started tapping our toes to “Gloria,” a disco tune that players adopted as their victory cry—despite the fact that it charted before anyone in the locker room was born. We took notice when Berube sat goalie Jake Allen in favor of Jordan Binnington, a fourth-string rookie who had more than 200 minor league games before winning 24 of his first 30 starts with a .933 save percentage. Alex Pietrangelo and the blue line started playing defense, and our offensive stars, Vladimir Tarasenko and Ryan O’Reilly, started playing like stars. We somehow made the playoffs for the seventh time in eight years.
Then a funny thing happened as we waited for the inevitable playoff exit: It never happened. We won on the road and at home. Binnington didn’t wilt in the net. The other stars kept shining, and we got unexpected contributions from the supporting cast, like Jaden Schwartz, a disappointing prospect whose postseason goals, including multiple hat tricks, were more than he scored all season. And when left-winger Patrick Maroon, a St. Louis native, netted the overtime game-winner in Game 7 of the conference semis against Dallas, we started to believe.
After our boys dispatched former playoff nemesis San Jose, the unthinkable was reality. And as we watched them skating in the Stanley Cup Final for the first time in many of our lifetimes, we were more than just proud of our team and our city. We were inspired—emboldened to believe that anything was possible.
