It feels extremely weird to write this, but the St. Louis Blues are Stanley Cup champions. It took them more than half a century — in that time there were three failed Cup bids and a subsequent 25-year playoff streak that included zero Cup appearances — but this current group of Bluenotes will forever have their names engraved onto the face of an ornate punch bowl.
We wrote Wednesday that Blues goalie Jordan Binnington was having one of the worst playoffs in recent memory among goalies who advanced to the Stanley Cup Final. That’s still true, but it didn’t matter in Game 7. Binnington was downright sublime, stopping 32 of the 33 shots the Boston Bruins directed onto his goal en route to a Game 7 performance for the ages. Binnington might have struggled at times during the playoffs, but no one will remember any of that — all anyone will remember are those 32 saves.
This is all a bit unbelievable when you consider where the Blues were positioned in the league standings just after the new year. In January, the Blues were just outperforming the Philadelphia Flyers and the Ottawa Senators, two teams that ended the season 16 and 34 points outside of playoff contention, respectively. It hardly looked like the Blues would win another dozen games, let alone qualify for the playoffs. And it most certainly didn’t look like they’d advance to the Stanley Cup Final.
His playoff struggles notwithstanding, the Blues wouldn’t have gotten this far without Binnington’s excellent regular season performance. When he was given the starting job by interim head coach Craig Berube — and yes, he is still technically the interim head coach! — the Blues were in the basement of the Western Conference. He proceeded to record 24 wins in 30 starts, and the Blues easily qualified for the playoffs.
Still, no one expected much from the Blues once the playoffs began. During the regular season, only one of their skaters finished in the top 50 in points; their power play was solid but unremarkable; their penalty kill was solid but unremarkable; their SRS was middle of the pack; their shooting percentage was middle of the pack, and therefore their total goals tally was middle of the pack, too.
An impressive second half of the season propelled the Blues to the playoffs, but they still didn’t appear to be particularly dangerous. If they were going to have a chance at winning some silverware, their postseason success would probably have to come from the source of their regular season success: rookie goaltender Binnington.
Like we said, Binnington struggled for stretches of the playoffs, but his flashes of brilliance were perfectly timed (late in the Western Conference finals, and late in the Stanley Cup Final). Save percentage is the most important factor for a team’s success. That’s true over the course of a season, and it’s also true over the course of a one-game, winner-take-all Game 7. Binnington stopped 97 percent of the shots the Bruins took Wednesday night, and the Blues are champions because of that.
And then there was Ryan O’Reilly, who won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff’s MVP. Before the 2018-19 season began, the Blues traded three players — Tage Thompson, Vladminir Sobotka, and Patrick Berglund, which is a pretty solid haul — to the Buffalo Sabres to bring O’Reilly into the mix. All he did from then on was have the best season of his already excellent career in terms of points scored, while also positioning himself as a frontrunner for the Frank J. Selke Trophy as the league’s best two-way forward. That brilliance carried over into the playoffs: O’Reilly finished in a tie with the Bruins’ left-winger Brad Marchand as the top scorer in the postseason, and finished alone atop the scoring list in the Stanley Cup Final.
Before they did so on Wednesday, the Blues had waited longer than any franchise in NHL history to lift their first Cup. They made the playoffs every season from 1979-80 to 2003-04. Their average regular season points percentage from 2011-12 to 2016-17 was an astonishing .648 — during that stretch, they were perennially considered among the favorites to win the Western Conference and the Stanley Cup Final. And yet somehow during each of those stretches of dominance they never advanced to the final, let alone lifted the Cup.
Instead, it took an imperfect team led by an imperfect goalie to deliver St. Louis its first-ever Cup victory. Which is kind of perfect.