St. Louis Blues turn Blues to Brilliance with Stanley Cup - After 52 Years Win First NHL Cup

Coach Craig Berube and team win Stanley Cup

America's newest Miracle on the Ice

One of the most incredible sports turnarounds in all of sports history took place last night when the St. Louis Blues hockey team won their very first Stanley Cup championship.  Less than six months ago in the middle of the NHL season the blues were a train wreck.

January 2019

After 52 years the Blues still had no Stanley Cup.

They are in last place in the entire conference.

The coach was fired and an interim coach was appointed.

A 25 year old rookie was named goalie who never played in the NHL.

The odds were 250-1 they would not win the Stanley Cup.

Like I said, a train wreck.  Yet, sometimes the sports gods like to shake things up.  The magic of the Blues is enchanting.  Way back when, I went to several Blues games in St. Louis in 1967, their first season.  My brother played basketball at St. Louis University.  I remember the hockey games and the arena seemed dark, smoke filled, and the Budweiser flowed freely.

The St. Louis Arena, first home of the Blues, was built in 1929.  The Arena was not well-maintained after the 1940s, and its roof was damaged by a February 1959 tornado. By the time the NHL's St. Louis Blues began playing at the Arena, it had fallen into such poor condition that it had to be heavily renovated in time for the 1967–68 season. As a condition of getting the expansion franchise, Blues owner Sid Salomon Jr. purchased the Arena from the Chicago Black Hawks, and spent several million dollars renovating the building and adding some 3,000 seats to bring the total to almost 15,000.

It never stopped being renovated from that day on, and held almost 20,000 seats by the time the Blues left the Arena in 1994. Many fans considered its sight lines the best of any arena in the league, which is remarkable considering that it was not originally built for hockey. It was also known as one of the loudest arenas in the league.

In 1977, the Arena and the Blues were purchased by Ralston Purina, which rechristened the building the Checkerdome after the company's checkerboard logo. By 1983, the cereal and pet food corporation had lost interest in the Blues and the Arena, and forfeited the team to the league. The team was purchased by Harry Ornest, a Los Angeles-based businessman, who promptly returned the Arena to its original name.

After the Blues moved to their new home, the venue now known as Enterprise Center,

The Miracle on Ice 2019 Season

Here is the newest Miracle on Ice in America, as the team that refused to give up finally came of age and today St. Louis can forget the floods and  disasters plaguing them all year, forget the blues, and celebrate the new world champion St. Louis Blues hockey team as they finally break the jinx and bring home the Stanley Cup.

This is how Sporting News describes the remarkable past six months.

Before we can even start with how this happened, we need to go all the way back to November with the firing of coach Mike Yeo and the promotion of associate Craig Berube . "Chief" took over a team that was 7-9-3.

Jan. 3

As stated above, the season was looking grim on this date. Before games started that Thursday night, St. Louis was 15-18-4 (34 points) with a minus-21 goal differential and dead last in the league.

That night, the Blues went out and beat the reigning Stanley Cup champion Washington Capitals 5-2. 

Jan. 5

St. Louis recalled 25-year-old goaltender Jordan Binnington from San Antonio (AHL). Two days later, he made his first start of the season and his career. The rest has been history.

Beginning with his 3-0 shutout of the Philadelphia Flyers on Jan. 7, the 2011 draft pick has posted a 21-5-1 record with an impressive 1.78 goals-against average and .932 save percentage.

Jordan Binnington of the @StLouisBlues became the 35th goaltender in League history to register a shutout in his first career NHL start and the eighth to do so in the past 15 years. #NHLStats pic.twitter.com/XipaVcRYIQ

- NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) January 8, 2019

Jordan Binnington notched his first NHL start and shutout on the same day he was announced @theAHL player of the week.

You could say last week was pretty good to him 👍 pic.twitter.com/R4hUT5UHav

- San Antonio Rampage (@sarampage) January 10, 2019

Binnington, who eventually took over the No. 1 spot from Jake Allen, has had his name thrown into the Calder Trophy and, dare we say, Vezina Trophy debates. He has earned Player of the Week honors twice this season (second star on Jan. 14; first star on Feb. 11) and was the NHL's Rookie of the Month for February.

Jan. 23-Feb. 19

Twenty-eight days. In just 28 calendar days, the Blues changed their season.

After losing 4-3 to the Kings on Jan. 21, St. Louis went on a tear, winning a franchise-record 11 consecutive games. After going from a game under. 500 (21-22-5) to 10 games over (32-22-5), the Blues were suddenly in a playoff spot and poised to make the postseason for the 42nd time in franchise history.

Over the course of those 11 games, St. Louis went 493 minutes and 42 seconds without trailing. Rookie sensation Binnington won nine in a row - tied for fifth-most by a rookie netminder in NHL history. The team's points leader, Ryan O'Reilly, scored 12 points. Vladimir Tarasenko notched an awe-inspiring 20 points (10 goals, 10 assists). Tarasenko, whose name was in the trade rumor mill in the beginning of January , was named the NHL's third star of the month for February.

Every season has a Cinderella team, a team with an amazing story. Worst-to-first St. Louis was the team this year. The glass slipper fits.

SN's Tom Gatto contributed to this report.

Thank you Blues for showing us that professional sports is not about superstars, outrageous salaries, major media markets, swollen egos and greed, but about the perseverance, hard work, fan loyalty, blue collar work ethic, and love of the game.

Congratulations to the St. Louis Blues and to the Boston Bruins who gave us a seven game thriller.  During the entire playoffs neither the Blues or the Bruins never had a fight break out on the ice, including during the championship series.  It is rare to see professional hockey without fights and I honor their sportsmanship.

Here is what the rest of the nation had to say about the amazing miracle on ice in the 2019 Stanley Cup.

Thanks to 32 saves from Jordan Binnington, the Blues took down the Bruins in Game 7 to win their first-ever Stanley Cup.

Laura Branigan “Gloria"  Blues Theme Song

From Worst to First, Blues Complete the Perfect Comeback with Stanley Cup Win

From the NHL’s cellar at the beginning of January to Stanley Cup champions just five months later, the Blues flipped the script in incredible fashion to end its 52-year championship drought.

By JOAN NIESEN 

June 13, 2019

The baseball town has a Stanley Cup.

The city Stan Kroenke labeled an economic backwater sold out the Enterprise Center for a game in Boston Wednesday night, and then Busch Stadium, too. The Cardinals were in Miami, and so upwards of 45,000 fans filled their stadium combined with the 18,000+ down Clark Avenue to keep the party going in St. Louis, the party the Blues spoiled Sunday and then reignited Wednesday with a 4–1 win in Boston. 

The Game 7 victory marked the city’s first Cup since the Blues’ inception in 1967, and it came as the conclusion to something like the perfect sports story. The team was the worst in the NHL on the morning of Jan. 3, a date that’s loomed large in St. Louis’s consciousness this spring—since the 11-game winning streak in January and February that vaulted the team up the standings, since it found itself improbably the No. 3 seed in the Central Division at the start of the playoffs. It’s been a sprint all spring, from worst to first for this team that was so recently left for dead.

The Blues took the Cup in fitting style: on the road, up against a wall, and thanks to goaltending that puts the word ridiculous to shame. It was Jordan Binnington’s promotion from the AHL to starter in January that sparked this run, and the team leapfrogged the rest of the Western Conference thanks to a spectacular road record—it was 12-4-5 away from the Enterprise Center from Jan. 23, the start of the streak, until the end of the regular season—and the looming sense that it was one game away from its fortunes reversing. But that’s the beauty of this team: It was never defined by its worst moments, always believed it was more than a fluky streak.

Wednesday, it proved that was the case.

Wednesday, it allowed the Bruins to at times control the pace of the game, but that didn’t matter. Binnington had 32 saves, allowing just one Boston goal, for a .970 save percentage. And the Bruins pounded him in the first and second periods especially, as his limbs flew left, right and upside down to deflect barrage after onslaught. 

For much of the game, St. Louis had a two-goal cushion thanks to first-period scores by eventual Conn Smythe Trophy winner Ryan O’Reilly and team captain Alex Pietrangelo, but it wasn’t until Brayden Schenn knocked in a goal at 11:25 in the third period that the game seemed like it could finally break the Blues’ way, shattering the longest Cup drought in the NHL.

They should never have been here, these Blues, who swung big in free agency over the summer and then sputtered in the fall. But that unlikely trajectory was familiar for so many people instrumental to the chase: Binnington, who was the fifth-string goalie in the organization when the season started, or Pat Maroon, the hometown kid who ended up signing for less money late in free agency proceedings.

Then there’s Laila Anderson, the 11-year-old with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocystosis, a rare immune disorder, who also happens to be a Blues superfan. She wasn’t able to leave the house throughout most of her beloved team’s run in the second half of this season, only to be permitted to start attending home games during the Western Conference Final, when the Blues defeated the Sharks in six games. On Tuesday, Laila learned doctors had cleared her to fly to Boston at the Blues’ invitation, and barely 24 hours later, her favorite player, Colton Parayko, lowered the Cup for her to kiss.

Throw the Vegas odds out the window. Math doesn’t do this justice.

Math says a team in the NHL’s cellar halfway through the season shouldn’t be playing in June, and superstition says the Blues are never allowed to compete this long. They hadn’t made the Stanley Cup Final since 1970, hadn’t even won a finals game until June 3. They’d been good, great sometimes, and always choked—but this year’s team flipped the script. 

This year’s team was very bad, on pace to be one of the worst in franchise history, and instead of coasting into the postseason as so many past iterations have, it clawed. St. Louis went 24-6-4 from Jan. 23 until the end of the regular season, and Binnington posted six shutouts over that span.

It continued to dominate—especially on the road—in the playoffs, tuning out amped up crowds from Winnipeg to Dallas to San Jose to Boston, finally, where it put the final stamp on a 10–3 road postseason record. Back in St. Louis, rain poured on the fans at Busch Stadium, fans who couldn’t have cared less what the Cardinals were doing down south, fans who screamed and danced and couldn’t discern the downpour from their tears.

After a series plagued with gripes about officiating, Game 7 was a clean one. There was just one penalty, on St. Louis, and thus only two minutes of 5-on-4 play. The Bruins and the Blues were able to match up at full strength and full emotion, and St. Louis played like a team familiar with the brink—which is exactly what it’s been all season. 

It played like a team unconcerned with Tuukka Rask’s near-perfection three nights earlier, or Boston’s glass-thumping, bellowing crowd. It played like a team that’s not listened to what anyone’s said about it all year, and it became just the seventh team to undergo a midseason coaching change before hoisting the Cup. It’s perhaps the first to renegotiate its identity so completely between January and June. 

The Blues have been best in the least likely circumstances, against the longest odds. One fan put down $400 on the team during a January trip to Las Vegas. The odds then that the Blues would win the Cup: 250–1. Wednesday night, he took home $100,000. It might have seemed crazy at the time. It might have seemed crazy last month.

For fans in St. Louis, it probably still seems crazy. But eventually, the shock will wear off, and 52 years of futility will suddenly seem like maybe, just maybe, they were worth it.