Last night the St. Louis Blues capped off a a pretty unbelievable season by beating the Boston Bruins 4-1 in Game 7 on the road to capture their first Stanley Cup win in franchise history. Sure that’s a pretty cliche take given coming out on top of an 82-game season plus a long and grueling playoff would be unbelievable for just about any team.
However when you step back from what the Blues were able to do in the playoffs and take a look at the whole season, to say what they accomplished in 2018-19 alone was unbelievable isn’t being trite, it really is pretty fucking unbelievable.
First, lets discern ourselves with the notion that the Blues went 3-4-3 for the month of October and 6-8 for the month of November which ultimately led to the firing on head coach Mike Yeo on November 19.
After Craig Berube took over on an interim basis things didn’t get much better as the Blues went 6-6-1 in December while undertaking a bit of a rebound in January going 7-4-1. Still though when the new year hit, St. Louis found themselves in last place not just in their own division, but the entire NHL.
Heading into February the Blues were 22-22-5 and hardly being considered a team that would be considered as second half favorites to make a run at the playoffs, let alone come out on top as Stanley Cup champions.
From there the Blues went on a tear compiling a record of 23-6-4 while snatching 25 of a total 28 points in February. Not to mention that compilation of success the final stretch of the regular season was done while playing 19 of 33 games on the road.
Then there was rookie goaltender Jordan Binnington who’s own story this year was pretty amazing when you consider he didn’t make his first start until January 7 after the combo of Jake Allen and Chad Johnson just wasn’t getting the job done. And when the regular season was finally over the 25-year-old compiled a league-best 1.89 goals-against average and .927 save percentage.
But lets not look past Berube as well.
For the Blues the change that the interim head coach put in place didn’t see immediate results but eventually the team bought into what Berube was pushing as the offseason additions of Ryan O’Reilly, David Perron, Tyler Bozak and Patrick Maroon started to pay some dividends while the squad became much tighter defensively. Add to that 30-goal-scoring winger Vladimir Tarasenko, veteran defenseman Jay Bouwmeester and captain Alex Pietrangelo and you all of a sudden have depth up and down the roster in front of goaltending that will steal you a win here and there.
Perhaps equally as shocking though to the Blues actually winning the Cup despite the aforementioned was GM Doug Armstrong not pulling the plug on the team as a whole as he did with Yeo in November.
