St. Louis Blues Finish Unbelievable Year: Jay Bouwmeester

When the St. Louis Blues picked up Jay Bouwmeester, they had high hopes he could be a piece of a winning team. Though things turned sour over the years, Big Bouw had a big part to play in the Blues winning the Stanley Cup.

When the St. Louis Blues acquired Jay Bouwmeester in the spring of 2013, the plan was multi-faceted. The Blues were looking for a veteran presence to help their young core keep on pace and also to gain an overall solid defenseman.

Bouwmeester has ridden the roller coaster enough to get motion sickness many times over, but has remained his calm, cool, perhaps quirky self throughout it all. He has quietly remained a gigantic part of this team’s defensive unit and kept all the public noise at bay – there has been a lot of it too.

Bouwmeester came to the Blues as the reigning iron-man of the NHL. He had not missed an NHL game in nine seasons prior to coming to St. Louis. His first season went great and then the snake bit.

Bouwmeester got injured in his second full season with the team and, of all things, it was a concussion or concussion-like symptoms. He missed 10 games that year and the following year of 2015-16 and his production went down too.

Bouwmeester had 33 assists and 37 points his first year with the Blues and it went down to 13, 15 and 19 the next three years. Regardless, his ice time did not dwindle until 2017-18, when injury kept him out of all but 35 games.

A hip injury ultimately took him out of that season and the summer and how he would recover or if he would recover was the question of the time. From everything the team told the public and what we saw in the preseason of 2018, it seemed he had made a full recovery. Then the 2018-19 season began.

It could not have gone much worse for Big Bouw. His skating was not clean at all and he looked like he had cement in his skates at times.

He used to be one of the fastest skaters going backwards in the league and suddenly it looked as though a dog on skates could have gotten by him. Bouwmeester looked slow and most of us thought age had just caught up to him. It turned out we were wrong.

Bouwmeester just needed to shake off the rust and get his hip strength completely back. That was something we were told had already happened, but until you put yourself to the test, there is no way of really knowing.

Bouwmeester actually turned his season around slightly before the Blues did. There were plenty of nights in the winter where he was the team’s best defender. At the time we used that as a joke for how bad the rest were, but it turned out that Bouwmeester really was playing well and he just needed his teammates to catch up to make that more apparent.

Shockingly, at age 35, Bouwmeester had one of his more physical seasons of his career. He blocked 127 regular season shots, which was the most of his Blues career, had over 60 hits and set a career mark for takeaways too.

For as much guff as fans give Bouwmeester, he turns things up in the playoffs. In both seasons where the St. Louis Blues got to at least the conference finals, he had over 50 shots attempted, over 20 penalty minutes and high numbers for hits and blocks.

In 78 games played in 2018-19, Bouwmeester threw 61 body checks. In 26 playoff games, he was credited with 32 hits.

Bouwmeester had 46 blocks as well. He became the defender we always hoped he would be and thought he might. It just took a few years.

Bouwmeester and Colton Parayko were as good a shutdown pair of defensemen as any team had in the league. They were constantly put against the opponent’s top trio and routinely kept them quiet.

Sometimes their teammates would not do the same against the other forwards, but 19 and 55 were not to be messed with. They were not wrecking-ball style guys like the old New Jersey Devils, but they were hard to deal with.

Still, Bouwmeester did not get a lot of credit. Maybe it is his personality or maybe it is the Blues fans’ habit of needing a whipping boy and it being too hard to let go of Bouwmeester being that guy.

Due to that, we forget that Bouwmeester was one of the main reasons the Blues even got to the conference final, let alone the Stanley Cup Final. Bouwmeester literally saved the team’s backside against Dallas in Game 7.

Ben Bishop was just about ready to be the next in a long line of former Blues to break their hearts by stopping everything the Blues had to throw at him. Then, in the dying moments of regulation it looked all over.

Roope Hintz found the loose change in the neutral zone and came in on the left wing. As Jeff Gordon pointed out in his article, Hintz faked out Jordan Binnington to get him to over-commit, then circled the goal for a wraparound. The net was seemingly empty

The unseen hero Bouwmeester reached in to knock the shot off the goal line. Mats Zuccarello was coming in for his own attempt, but eliminated with a body check.

It was not until the final replay that you could truly see how great a defensive play it was.

Without that play by Bouwmeester, there is no hometown hero for Pat Maroon. There is no parade down Market Street or fans wondering if they will sing Gloria forever or are sick of it. There is no Stanley Cup in St. Louis.

When the puck drops on 2019-20, fans will probably revert to type. They will wonder why Bouwmeester was given another contract, even if only a one year extension.

He will probably return to being the whipping boy of the social media masses. It cannot be denied that he was a huge part in the Blues winning their first Stanley Cup ever.

He’s another example of a guy that seemed to come full circle, or perhaps go from the very bottom to the very top with this team. It looked like he was done before we ever thought the team was done and neither ended up being true.

Bouwmeester deserved just as much recognition from the national media as being a guy that played his heart out for so long to never get anything as Joe Thornton and never got it. He will never get the recognition of other guys on his own team either.

He does not need it. Bouwmeester is a guy that can only truly be known and understood by those on the team and his family. He is somewhat of an enigma outside of that.

What we do know is he is a Stanley Cup champion. He was not just along for the ride either, but one of many drivers.