St. Louis Blues Proving They Are Among The NHL Elite

By Todd Panula | Dec 31, 2019

WINNIPEG, MB - DECEMBER 27: St. Louis Blues players celebrate a 5-4 overtime victory over the Winnipeg Jets at the Bell MTS Place on December 27, 2019 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. (Photo by Darcy Finley/NHLI via Getty Images) /

Winning a Stanley Cup does not automatically make you elite in the NHL. However, the St. Louis Blues are proving they are one of the league’s best now.

St. Louis Blues fans know all about the doubts across the league. Fans from other teams and other cities litter social media with their lame excuses.

The Blues were a one-hit wonder. St. Louis apparently won by cheating, if you check in on Winnipeg’s Twitter feed. The refs were paid off by the Blues, which is laughable since the referees have never really seemed to give the Blues the benefit of the doubt, but I digress. It all boils down to other fan bases believing they will never have to suffer the indignity of the Blues coming within a sniff of the Stanley Cup again.

For all we know for certain, they could be right. There have been plenty of teams that won one Stanley Cup in recent history and not returned.

Tampa Bay only won once and never really got back for a good, long time. The same is true of the Carolina Hurricanes and the Anaheim Ducks. Shh, don’t tell Boston fans, but they’ve only one one Cup too in the last 40 years.

The difference for Boston, compared to those other teams after they won, is Boston has maintained a level of competitiveness and come close to winning others. While we do not know how close the Blues might come in their defending year, we do know they have entered the ranks of the elite.

Blackhawks fans are going to balk at this idea, based solely on the fact they have three Cups over the last decade compared the Blues one. We are not trying to say the Blues are a dynasty in the making. Elite and dynastic are two different things.

The Blues are simply in the upper echelon of the league, regardless of market size and media coverage. They have proved it and continue to prove it.

While you would not really know it if you did not live in St. Louis, the Blues have been one of the most consistent teams over the last 10 years. The numbers bear it out.

How the Blues won proves they are one of the best in the NHL too. Doubters can hate, but any team that con find the consistency to go from near last place in January to winning the Stanley Cup is anything but a flash in the pan. That takes determination, skill and belief, all of which the Blues still possess.

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Beyond the past, the Blues continue to prove their stature within the game in the season following. Instead of falling back to the pack, which many analysts thought they would, the Blues have maintained themselves at, or near, the top of the division and conference right from the start of 2019-20.

The Blues have had to overcome a lot of adversity on the way too. While there are other teams with just as many injuries, maybe a few with more, no team has done as well as the Blues with as many key injuries.

The Blues have basically been without as much as a third of their starting forwards at one time or another this season. They have been without Alex Steen, Sammy Blais, Robert Thomas, Zach Sanford, Mackenzie MacEachern and Vladimir Tarasenko for multiple games – some more than others, obviously.

The Blues have overcome all those injuries. The Blues won 17 of their first 26 without Vladimir Tarasenko. They have gone 21-6-3.

The Blues are also undefeated in 2019-20 when scoring first. They are the only team left in the NHL to be able to say that.

These are all the marks of elite teams. Pittsburgh, at their best, was one of the best at overcoming these things. Whether it was injury or players leaving, the Penguins just kept pushing forward to the tune of two Cups in the last 10 years.

While it feels weird to compare the Blues to the Blackhawks, they are in the same boat. For years, they managed to always find the next guy waiting in the minors.

The Blues are getting the same kind of response from their prospects. Thomas and Jordan Kyrou are starting to fulfill the potential we saw in them as junior players, much the same way guys like Alex DeBrincat did for Chicago.

The Blues also had players come from obscurity like the “elite” teams before them. Nobody expected MacEachern or Ivan Barbashev or Blais to be as integral to the team’s success as they have been. They stepped up at the right times and did not let go of the proverbial brass ring.

To continue being elite will be difficult. Professional sports does not allow for sustained success that often.

Even so, the Blues are built for the present and the future. They will continue to be a team to be reckoned with for the foreseeable future.

Other fans can claim the Blues are a flash in the pan. The truth is, their Stanley Cup was the culmination of many years of being very good.

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The Blues don’t have the star power of Washington or Pittsburgh or Chicago, but some of that boils down to the market just as much as the actual players. Outside of their biggest stars, I’d put the overall roster St. Louis has against many of those teams.

That’s because the Blues have reached elite status. The rest of the NHL is just catching on.

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