St. Louis Blues: Saskatoon Almost Gave St. Louis The Blues

The St. Louis Blues have become such a fabric of the city, it is hard to imagine them anywhere but St. Louis. That was not always the case.

Most of us grew up with the St. Louis Blues as part of our culture. There was never a time when they did not exist in the city.

There are still plenty of fans that remember when the team came into existence, but even they were young when that happened. When a team has been around for over 50 years, it’s hard to imagine them being anywhere but in this city, followed by its passionate fans.

However, history likes to play games on us sometimes. The truth is the 2019 Stanley Cup championship almost never came to be if just a few events transpired differently in 1983.

Starting prior to the 1978-79 season, the Blues were owned by R. Hal Dean, essentially making Ralston Purina the owners of an NHL franchise. Their tenure in charge was up and down, like many owners, but Dean retired and his successor had no interest in continuing the company’s majority interest in the Blues.

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Thus, 1983 almost became the year the Blues left. New Purina executive William Stiritz had an agreement, in principle, with a Saskatoon based company called Batoni-Hunter Enterprises, Ltd.

The sale was announced in January of that year. The league put off a vote until the regular season was over.

Thankfully, on May 18, 1983, the NHL stepped in and saved the Blues as we know it. Given the city’s recent history with such votes going the other way, we should be thankful the NHL is quite different than the NFL.

Still, 1983 continued to be an unmitigated disaster. Ralston Purina locked up the arena and boycotted the 1983 NHL Draft.

That draft included names like Steve Yzerman, Pat LaFontaine, Tom Barasso, John MacLean, Esa Tikkanen, Peter Zezel, Bob Probert, Kevin Stevens, Rick Tocchet and others. A few of those played for the Blues later in their careers, but any year you have zero draft picks sets you back as a franchise.

Despite the league saving the Blues in May, there was still no great hope the Blues would remain in existence. The NHL put a timetable on things and it came down to the wire before the team would have been dissolved.

Harry Ornest came in and bought the Blues in the summer. Despite saving the team from certain death, Ornest ran things rather cheaply, which did not allow them to push for the Stanley Cup as much as they might have with a different owner.

Nevertheless, without Ornest and without the NHL board of governors being on St. Louis’ side, the Blues might have gone to Saskatoon.

Can you imagine how different things would have been? Probably still wearing diapers when this happened, I would have had no memory of hockey being in St. Louis. As it was, I barely remembered the St. Louis Football Cardinals having been around.

And what would have happened in Saskatoon? I won’t say anything ill of a city I’ve never been to, but St. Louis has a population of over 300,000, a county population of almost one million and a metro population of over two million (according to Google).

Saskatoon’s population is around 273,000. It’s metro population is about 1.15 million.

Those are not gigantic differences, but every person lost is potential dollars not going to that city’s team. You might argue that the Blues would have belonged to all of Saskatchewan, but they still would have been an extremely regional team, just like St. Louis.

Also, the Canadian dollar has been wildly up and down. Except for a brief time in the early 2010’s, when it was actually worth slightly more than a U.S. dollar, the American dollar has been vastly higher in value.

That has been a big reason why the NHL has veered away from Canadian markets. There was not a big push to save the Quebec Nordiques because the value of the team was going to be higher in Denver.

While there are other reasons, the value of the Canadian dollar still plays a role in Quebec, or any Canadian city, getting a franchise in the future. Unless the economies changed a lot, it is extremely unlikely that any Canadian city will get a team any time soon.

So, if the Blues moved to Saskatoon in 1983, would they still be there? That’s impossible to answer.

Maybe attendance would have been so great that the team would have been profitable. However, the Quebec scenario suggests that any issues with the Blues in Canada might have led them to relocate back to the States eventually.

What if they were the Florida Blues or the Nashville Blues instead of those cities receiving expansion teams?

Fortunately, that’s all just talk show discussion. The team stayed, by whatever means necessary, and eventually won the Stanley Cup.

It only took them another 36 years after almost leaving, but they won it. We can make fun of the league and its commissioner, but the NHL came up big for St. Louis in 1983. Without them, we would have been singing a different tune in the summer of 2019.