The St. Louis Blues finished the 2018-19 season as Stanley Cup Champions, but how they got there is even more unbelievable. Pat Maroon’s story might be one of the best of bunch.
Every storybook or legend is usually remembered by how it ended. For the St. Louis Blues, it will not be any different, but how it started in 2018-19 and how they got to the end is just as impressive if not more so.
With that in mind, we are going to begin a series of articles discussing some of the most unbelievable stories surrounding this team and the players. What better way to begin than with Pat Maroon?
St. Louis loves its hometown kids. It is not impossible to make it in the Lou if you were not originally from here, but you certainly get ahead a little faster when you know the people.
All the voices of St. Louis sports at the moment are from here. Dan Mclaughlin and Chris Kerber both grew up in St. Louis. John Kelly spent a good deal of his childhood in St. Louis.
So, it should be no surprise that a St. Louis team had a St. Louis kid on it. If you look at any professional soccer team in St. Louis over the years, it has almost been a demand that they have hometown guys on there. That has not been the case for much of the Blues history, but that had more to do with the level of hockey being played in St. Louis.
We all know about the draft several years ago that ushered St. Louis into the national mind as a true hockey hotbed. However, the first wave of guys to really make it included the likes of Maroon and Chris Butler, another member of this franchise as it won its first ever championship.
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For people in the STL, you could probably stop there and it would be enough. There is still so much more to the Maroon story.
Maroon began his hockey career in St. Louis. Growing up in Oakville, he played for the St. Louis AAA Blues and then with the Amateur Blues.
Maroon then went down south to play with the Texarkana Bandits of the NAHL. As fate would have it, the Bandits got relocated to St. Louis, playing their homegames on the floodplains of Chesterfield.
Maroon helped guide that team, along with the help of current Tampa Bay Lightning head coach Jon Cooper, to the Robertson Cup in his first and only year in St. Louis. He finished that season with 40 goals and 95 points and then 10 goals and 23 points in the playoffs alone.
Maroon passed on the college idea after being drafted by the Philadelphia Flyers and went to the London Knights of the OHL, known for producing a lot of NHL players. Maroon again hit 95 points in the Canadian league.
From there, it was on to the pros. Maroon had to languish some years in the AHL because, by his own admission, he did not know how to play at that level. His size had given him such an advantage over his peers that he never quite learned how to put in the extra effort behind the scenes.
It cost him his opportunities in Philadelphia. Anaheim took a flyer on him and it paid off.
Maroon spent several seasons with the Ducks, the Edmonton Oilers and even a short stay with the New Jersey Devils. Never did it really creep into his mind he might return to St. Louis, other than in the summer.
However, life plays funny games with you. Maroon had a son back in St. Louis and we all saw how being away from him affected Maroon after scoring a goal in St. Louis with the Oilers.
That started to weigh on Maroon as he felt he was missing too many large chunks of his son’s life. Even then, coming home was not a huge option. Maroon was not going to be demanding trades because that is not really how he operates.
Fate stepped in with a strange assist. A back injury limited Maroon in 2017-18 and the offseason of his free agency was not a smooth one.
All the big names kept coming off the board, so to speak, but nobody was really burning down Maroon’s phone line. We are told now that there were higher offers from other teams, but Maroon wanted to play at home in front of his son.
The heartwarming story in the summer turned a little cold once hockey began in the fall. Maroon struggled to score.
He racked up assists, but the first goal with the Blues did not come for almost two months, at the end of November. Only nine more would follow after that.
There were whispers that Maroon wanted out of St. Louis before Christmas even rolled around, likely due to his frustration and the team’s awful play. Rumors even spread that the story about playing at home might not have been as true as we thought.
On 101 ESPN, the Blues beat reporter told how he had heard rumblings that Maroon may actually have wanted to take the money from New Jersey. Instead, if this is true, Maroon’s agent may have talked him into St. Louis in an effort to get a bigger contract afterward. It seemed to all be blowing up in their faces no matter what the truth was.
But, as things tend to do, the pendulum swung back the other way. Maroon had a four-game goal scoring streak in March, when the team was surging up the standings.
After bouncing around the lineup from line to line, Maroon found his teammates in unlikely sources. Maroon got paired with the rookie Robert Thomas and fellow newcomer Tyler Bozak. After that line got put together, it stayed together the entire year and posteason, with the exception of injuries.
Though all three played different styles, they complimented the other. The veteran voices of Maroon and Bozak calmed Thomas down and let him know his job was to make the plays and they would handle the rest.
Maroon might only have added three goals in the playoffs, but they were all huge. Perhaps none will ever be quite as big as the one he scored in Game 7 against Dallas in the second round.
Can you imagine? A hometown kid, scoring in Game 7 in St. Louis? That is the stuff we all dream about, no matter our sport of choosing. The only way to top it would have been to actually win the Stanley Cup with that goal.
Maroon did not get that luxury, but I doubt he will be crying anything but tears of joy into that Stanley Cup.
Maroon is now the first every St. Louis-born kid to have his name on the Stanley Cup. There were a couple guys that just missed it, with their teams winning just before they got there, but Maroon did it.
Not only will his name go on there, but Maroon was an integral part of why the Blues advanced and won.
He won the series against Dallas, scoring two goals overall, including that game winner in Game 7.
He took everything not going his way and turned it around. He dealt with an injury here or a healthy scratch there and kept bouncing back.
Maroon shrugged off all the media. He paid no mind to bloggers and their clever titles.
Instead, he had the year of his life. He signed with the team he grew up with, though it took almost a week to make it official.
He became a battle-hardened, playoff veteran just when the Blues needed him. Maroon hit some milestones on the way too.
He likely would have been a local hero just for the Dallas performance and it would have capped off his story nicely.
Instead, he helped his team – our team – win the ultimate prize and there could be no better end.
Maroon was fighting back tears, perhaps more than any of the other Blues, because he truly knows what it means to everyone outside that locker room. Players talk about the fans, but until you’ve lived it, it is almost like a family member being in the service or giving birth. You cannot truly know what it’s about unless you have gone through it. Maroon did and he knows what this all means to this city and his family.
We see videos all the time of players hugging family and people crying. For some reason, it hit a little harder when he was finally able to embrace his son and we saw his mother crying those awful mother tears – sorry moms, but you’re almost all “ugly criers”.
It gave you that warm and fuzzy feeling that so few things seem to these days.
Maroon is no longer that top line talent. He does not have the speed to be up that high in the lineup, but he is still a pro and a damn good one.
Maroon, like so many other guys on this team, found exactly where he fit and played his role perfectly. Through all the ups and downs, the contract talks and the storybook seeming to have turned into a nightmare, he stuck with it.
Though I have lived here from birth and almost my entire life, I have never fully embraced the local ideal that our guys are better than any other city’s. This is the first time I have truly been proud to have someone from my city on my team and win it all. It is not the ingredients to a satisfying cake, but it is a pretty sweet icing. Now, both he and St. Louis can call themselves Stanley Cup champions.