How the Team of the St. Louis Blues Won Lord Stanley’s Cup

No sport requires unified team play more than hockey.  There’s no mano-mano confrontation like pitcher/hitter as in baseball. No one player in hockey can skate the length of the ice and score a goal like a basketball player can drive the floor solo for a quick bucket.   In football, a blown blocking assignment might mean only a loss in yardage to be made up on the next play. In hockey, it could be the game-winning goal.

The Blues won the Stanley Cup because their team play was the best in the National Hockey League.   On a team that boasts of no NHL marquee idols—no Alexander Ovechkin nor Sydney Crosby, no Patrick Kane nor Connor McDavid—the Blues proved that their collective team was greater than the sum of their individual players.   A review of the four rounds of playoffs—and all of the teammates who contributed to their sixteen wins for The Cup—underscores the point.

Round One vs. Winnipeg.        

The opening round of the playoffs began a pattern with two victories in Winnipeg negated by two losses at home against the Jets.  In Game 1, the Blues rallied with two goals in the third period, the winner scored by Tyler Bozak, set up by Pat Maroon from behind the net after he outfought two Jet defenders for the puck. 

Ryan O’Reilly scored the game winner in Game 2, with assists from the tandem of Jay Bouwmeester and Colton Parayko.  The mobile defensive pairing with long armed reaches would shutdown opponents’ top lines from Winnipeg to Boston.   After recovering from a debilitating hip injury, Bouwmeester returned to form as a savvy veteran who abetted Parayko’s emergence as a standout defenseman on both ends of the ice.

After a disastrous trip home to lose two games, this year’s squad found themselves down 2-0 in the third period of Game 5 in Winnipeg looking like so many of their predecessors in abbreviated playoff runs.  But St. Louis rallied with three goals, the last one scored with a mere 15 seconds remaining in the game.  After hard work on the sideboards, Bozak aired a hard pass towards the slot that Jaden Schwartz batted with the blade of his stick, which changed the puck’s direction a near 90 degrees as it flew by the startled Jet netminder for the game winner.

That direction-changing goal also changed the offensive direction for Schwartz—a proven performer who never quit skating but languished offensively during the regular season scoring only 11 goals in 72 games.  More importantly, the pivotal win snatched from the jaws of defeat, infused the Blues with an aura of destiny.

Schwartz continued with his hot hand bagging a hat trick in Game 6 as five different Blues drew assists on his trifecta.   The Blues grounded the Jets from further flight in the playoffs by the score of 3 to 2, in a game not nearly as close as the score when Winnipeg scored in the game’s waning moments.   The Jets crash and burn surprised many who picked them as a Stanley dark horse, but it was St. Louis that advanced to Round Two.

Round Two vs. Dallas. 

The Dallas Stars presented a strong challenge as a similar opponent that played a smothering defense backed by solid goaltending.  With St. Louisan Ben Bishop in goal, the Stars defeated its rival twice during their foes’ stellar run in the last months of the regular season, including a victory that ended the Blues’ 11 game winning streak.

Before the Series, Coach Berube aired concern that the team needed more from Vladimir Tarasenko, but added that he thought that he would get it.  The Tank scored two goals in the opener including a mad dash on a power move that took as much grit as skill.  Heedless to the danger of a headlong drive into the teeth of the defense, Tarasenko accelerated past a defender from the right wing boards, and cut sharply towards the goalmouth area at top speed where he fired one up top to beat a mesmerized Bishop. 

The team’s 3 to 2 victory was followed by a loss at home to the disciplined Stars in a series developing into a tight-checking affair.

But Game Three’s third period would prove to be an aberration where the Blues held a one goal lead when they surrendered a short-handed goal—one of four goals that would be scored in a five-minute span.  With just under two minutes left in regulation, Maroon would bull over a Dallas defensemen and beat Bishop up high from in tight for the victory in a seesaw affair.

The Stars won Games 4 and 5 and headed home to Dallas with confidence that the Blues playoff miseries would continue.  Except that the Blues—like a vagabond diner—preferred to eat away from home.  David Perron scored the tiebreaker in the second period.  A bomb by Parayko felled Bishop, rebounded to Alexander Steen who set up Schwartz for an insurance goal.  The series would return to St. Louis.

Game 7 was a tight affair with the Blues applying pressure throughout.  The Stars seemed to be playing a game of rope-a-dope, content to let Bishop make save after save—stopping 52 in total—while they cleared rebounds, minimized grade A scoring chances and waited for a break.   

Tense moments continued through one, then two overtimes in a 1-1 game.  The Blues finally broke free when 19-year old Robert Thomas made a nifty move off a Bozak faceoff win and put a shot off the post that fell tantalizingly inside the blue paint where local lad Maroon swept in like a vulture on dead meat to put it home for a sudden death series winner.

Round Three Conference Championship vs. San Jose.

The first game of the Series conjured the old saw of the Blues being the Chicago Cubs of the NHL after they were pasted 6 to 3.

In Game 2, the Blues took a hard fought 2 to 1 lead when they went on a second period power play.  At this point in the playoffs, fans began to ask themselves if the team might be better off declining the penalty.   Logan Couture intercepted an errant pass and skated in alone to beat Binnington.  

The momentum seemed to be all Sharks, when Robert Bortuzzo skated around old Joe Thornton—the commentators’ darling who ‘deserved’ a Cup—who was burned like stale coffee.  Bortuzzo went forehand backhand and deftly put the puck into the top corner with a shot that would have made Wayne Gretzky proud.  Oskar Sundqvist put the dagger in for the game’s fourth goal on a nifty set up by Steen. The Blues were back in the series.

Game 3 was handed to San Jose.  Falling behind 3 to 1, the Blues frantic second period rally saw them take a 4 to 3 lead on a goal by Tarasenko and two more by Perron.   Thereafter, a tenacious forecheck kept the Sharks penned and denied of any solid chances to tie the game that was dominated by their opponent for the past 30 minutes of action. 

But the wind suddenly chilled the Blues with an excess of caution as they repeatedly iced the puck giving San Jose opportunities from the face off that they could not garner when they tried to penetrate the offensive zone on the rush.  One such faceoff with a minute left led to a scramble that saw two Sharks outnumber the defense in front of Binnington that allowed Couture to tie the score.  

In overtime, a hand pass—seen by all except those with the whistles—went to an unmarked Erik Karlsson in close who scored the game winner.   But it was how the Blues responded to the debacle that demonstrated that the Blues were indeed the new Cubs—as in the Chicago team that won it all in 2016.   

Instead of whining about the non-call, Craig Berube put the events in proper perspective.  Known as Chief by his players, he had taken over the reins of a down and out team that was last in the league in early January, and instilled in it a brand of heavy, hard-nosed play for which he himself was known as a pugnacious winger for the Philadelphia Flyers.  The Chief understood that the Blues had blown it by their play in the last 90 seconds of regulation, and it was they who put themselves in a position to be defeated by the oft-times caprice of overtime. 

The stoic acceptance from the Chief, a tough but fair Canadian with a First Nation bloodline from Calahoo, Alberta straightforwardly explained that there was nothing that could be done about it now other than to resolve to get back to business.  Following his lead, his club would not lose again in this series.

In Game 4 in St. Louis, their fans saw their club come out with a first period fury led by their so-called fourth line consisting of two Swedes and a Russian—Sundqvist, Steen and Ivan Barbashev.  The trio was the team’s most voracious on the forecheck dispelling the myth of yore about soft Swedes and skilled Russians not being able to make it in the rough and tumble of the NHL. 

Barbashev scored in the game’s opening minute, his goal coming after Steen slammed the much larger Brent Burns who coughed up the puck as he went down like a fallen oak tree.   Bozak scored later in the period, and the Blues evaded the circling Sharks who menaced but could not bite a watertight Binnington but once as the Blues won it, 2 to 1.

The Blues heavy forecheck wore down the Sharks and paid dividends in Game 5.  The Blues led two zip in the second period, but the game remained in doubt until Tarasenko was awarded a penalty shot.  The St. Louis favorite skated in on the Shark’s goaltender’s left and quickly snapped a sputnik rocket wrister that found the top corner of the net that no goalie either side of the old iron curtain could stop.  Schwartz finished the game with yet another hat trick, and Binnington stopped all 21 shots that came his way for a dominant 5-0 whitewash.

Game 6 was almost a given as San Jose depleted by injury from the Blues rhythm assault forecheck competed gamely to keep it close.  With the Blues up 2 to 1, Brayden Schenn—an offensive-type player turned human wrecking ball—was finally rewarded with a goal that harpooned the Sharks and left them sinking to the bottom.  The final was 5 to 1 as St. Louis outscored San Jose 10 to 1 in the final two games. 

The Stanley Cup Finals vs. Boston.

The St. Louis Blues were headed to the Stanley Cup Finals, and a certain dare-we-dare euphoria enveloped the team’s faithful.  It was 49 years since the last visit to the Finals against the same Boston Bruins, but now with better odds in their favor.  This club was not the 1970 expansion team of castoffs and aging vets pitted against an opponent that claimed the league’s elite players.  Possessed with the spirit of the original Blues, this year’s version now included the talent to match their opponent.  The time had come to excise the flying ghost of Bobby Orr.

Nonetheless, before Game 1, nearly all national scribes and commentators predicted that the Bruins would prevail as a team with too much speed and skill—that included a line anointed as the Perfection Line with David Pasternak, Todd Marchand and Patrice Bergeron—for the heavy hitting Blues to contain.  However, the Blues started out like the better team in the opener as they staked themselves to a 2-0 lead.  But the Bruins took over and made the prognosticators look like Merlin.  Boston scored four unanswered goals to win it, 4 to 2.

Game 2 proved that the Blues mettle was stoked by emotion and grit.  They fell behind 2 to 1, but continued to bedevil Boston with a tenacious forecheck.  And unlike the previous game, they proved that they could skate with Boston when Schwartz zoomed out of his zone on an odd man rush with Tarasenko who left a wandering Marchand in his ice shavings.  Rask stopped Schwartz’s initial shot and Zdeno Chara blocked Tarsenko’s rebound attempt that came back to the falling sniper as he was bodily falling away from the goal. Nearly perpendicular to the ice, the Russian acrobat somehow lifted a backhand over the Bruin goalie for a contortionist’s goal to knot the score.

The second and third period bore witness to the Blues better five on five play but neither team could break the deadlock.  One can only imagine what Coach Berube told his team in between periods but it certainly must have been “Vince Lombardi-esque” exhorting his team to play to win and caution be damned.

The overtime lasted just under 4 minutes of continuous action totally dominated by all four forward lines of the Blues with their defensemen pinching in to keep the forecheck alive in Boston’s zone.  Damn the turnovers, no worry of mistakes or odd man rushes:  The Blues were marching in and taking no prisoners.  Any Bruin who touched the puck drew heavy contact from a determined foe.

The winning sequence remains perhaps the greatest in Blues history because it gave the team the inner credentials and confidence to win the Stanley Cup.  Schwartz came off the bench as if shot out of a cannon and made a bee-line to Tory Krug who was carrying the puck up ice in the neutral zone in a rare moment that Boson possessed the puck.  Krug dumped the puck to evade the onrushing Schwartz, and the Blues came back the other way, chipping the puck into the Boston zone, with Schwartz chasing after it like an indefatigable greyhound. 

The Bruins came up with the puck but only for a moment as Schwartz came up from behind with an extra burst of speed and knocked down the attempted outlet pass and re-claimed it for the game’s final push.  Another Bruin had a chance to clear the zone, but Pietrangelo came all the way from his right defense to the far left wing boards to splatter the Bruin defensemen that led to a cough up to Steen who bored in on goal and was tripped for a delayed penalty. 

In the scramble that followed, Carl Gunnarson retrieved a loose puck twice deep in Boston’s zone and circled back with it to the blue line.  On the second occasion, he passed to O’Reilly who had come in for Binnington who was pulled on the delayed penalty.  Gunnarson took the return pass and ripped one high over Tuukku Rask’s right shoulder for the most dramatic goal in St. Louis Blues’ lore.  Sundqvist and O’Reilly drew assists but the goal was attributable just as much to Steen, Pietrangelo and Schwartz as it was for those on the score sheet.

St. Louis fans gathered for Game 3 for what they thought would be a storm on Boston, but it was the hometown heroes that were doused in a rain of opponent goals.  In a game that saw everything they touched turn to gold and goals, the Bruins rolled to a 7 to 2 victory that included four power play goals netted on just four shots.  Binnington looked shaky and was pulled from the game as prognosticators reprised their ‘we told you show’ refrain.

The kamikaze Blues returned to form and initiated play in Game Four’s opening moments.  Vince Dunn—back in the lineup two weeks after a slapped puck cracked his face and teeth—ripped one from the point that Rask saved but O’Reilly corralled and curled in a wrap-around goal 43 seconds into the first period. 

St. Louis continued its aggressive forecheck and re-took the lead on Tarasenko’s rebound goal after a blast from Pietrangelo.   Petro—as the team captain is known and who heard questions about his leadership back in the cold days of December—was leading his team at both ends with sound play defensively and timely jumps into the offensive zone, leading all defensemen in post season scoring with 3 goals and 16 assists.

However, another power play went awry—the Blues were only 1 for 18 on the power play in the Finals—this one resulting in a crushing shorthanded goal against to tie the score in a game that the home team had dominated. 

The Blues continued to press, but the Bruin’s goaltender was keeping his team in the game into the third period when Pietrangelo let loose a wicked slap shot that Rask stopped but the on charging O’Reilly swatted out of midair and into the net for a 3-2 win for the home club. 

Pivotal Game 5 returned to Boston, where the visitors found themselves on their heels for the first 20 minutes.  Rookie goaltender Binnington stopped all 17 shots to keep his team in the game.  The 25 year-old minor league journeyman’s role in leading his team to the Stanley Cup Finals was well chronicled, and his stellar performance in this pivotal game after the Game 3 debacle reaffirmed the adage that a team will go only so far as their goaltender’s play allows.   The rookie demonstrated that he could forget yesterday and play today.

O’Reilly scored in the second period on assists from Petro and Sanford.  St. Louis clung to a 1-0 lead into the third period when Bozak tripped Accari but the referee declined to call a penalty.  Perron scored in the immediate aftermath, which proved to be the difference.  Boston finally solved Binnington later but it was not enough as the Blues won it, 2 to 1.   Afterwards, Bruins Coach Bruce Cassidy sounded far more vocal and victimized in his grievance about the missed call than Coach Berube was after the hand pass game that sunk the Blues.

Lord Stanley’s Cup was in St. Louis for Game 6, but the advantage resided not with the locals, which would finish the playoffs with a 6 and 7 record on home ice.  Early penalties resulted in a two-man advantage that Marchand converted for 1-0 lead for the visitors.  The Blues played ‘tight’, and Rask again proved even tighter in goal.  The Bruins pocketed four goals in the third period and headed home for Game 7, where the spotlight fell on the teams’ respective goaltenders with talk of Rask winning the Conn Smythe as the playoff MVP, and of the woes of the Binnington bubble burst.  Most opined that Boston would win Game 7, and the Stanley Cup.

Anything can happen in a Game Seven, and in this one, what happened was a reversal of fortune for the teams’ respective goaltenders.  The Bruin gave it all out in the first period keeping the Blues on their heels while generating several excellent scoring chances. But Game Six’s maligned net minder Jordan Binnington stood down the criticism and stood up to the vulcanized rubber barrage.  

Big saves early often reap rewards later.  As so oft happens when a team dominating fails to find the back of the net, the opponent cashes in on a sole opportunity.  In this case, the Blues cashed twice.

The first goal came with just three minutes left in the period when Sammy Blais’ fore-checking collision dislodged the puck from a Bruin defender, which led to a series of passes that ultimately found Bouwmeester open for a shot from the left point.   The hot-handed O’Reilly deftly deflected the shot altering the puck’s trajectory that found its way through Rask’s five hole.  The puck was in and out of the goal in a flash that shocked the hometown crowd.  

Obtained in an offseason poach from the Buffalo Sabres, O’Reilly rotated like a buzz saw on offense, defense, face-offs and penalty kills and scored the opening goal of the Finals in three of his team’s four victories.  He would finish atop the scorer’s sheet in playoff points, but it was his all-around team play that garnered the Conn Smythe Trophy.

Not stopping there, the Blues struck again in the waning seconds of the first period.   Schwartz gathered a puck in the neutral zone and carried over the Boston blue line around a flat-footed Marchand.  A Bruin defenseman moved to over to cover the onrushing forward.  Schwartz looked back to see Marchand inexplicably heading to the bench for a line change leaving a vacant patch of ice filled by an onrushing Pietrangelo.  Schwartz laid the puck back in the open spot where Petro took it in stride and raced towards the open slot.  Forehand backhand and into the top of the net.  

Eight seconds remained in the first period and the Blues had scored two goals on just four shots at Tuukku Rask.  Thanks to Binnington’s heroics and Bruin defensive miscues, St. Louis found itself up 2-0 in a period where the score could have been reversed in Boston’s favor.

The second period witnessed a relentless team that sniffed Lord Stanley’s silver and dogged the Bruins defensively while adding a few near-miss scoring chances of their own.  In the third period, Binnington made still another clutch save stopping Nordstrom on the doorstep to preserve the two goal lead.

As the final period wore on, the Bruins broke down defensively as they pressed for a goal to get them back in the game.  Tarasenko set up Schenn as Boston’s Perfection Line imperfectly trailed the play that sealed the game.  Sanford potted a fourth goal making the Bruins late sole tally meaningless. 

At the final buzzer, the Blues poured onto the ice to claim the franchise’s first Stanley Cup, and send St. Louis into an ecstasy that only a 52 year long wait for a first kiss on Lord Stanley’s Cup can engender.   Appropriately, the names of all the Blues players will be inscribed on that venerable trophy as befits a total team victory.

Paul Lore 6/16/19