St. Louis Blues Jordan Binnington Gets Vezina Recognition, Sort Of

The NHL unveiled its end of season awards in full on September 21. While the St. Louis Blues got no love in winning, they did manage to finish reasonably high in the voting.

The St. Louis Blues 2019-2020 season ended on as sour a note as you could get for a playoff team. That was especially true for goaltender Jordan Binnington.

The team had sky-high aspirations of repeating as Stanley Cup champions. Prior to the pandemic pause, the Blues sat atop the Western Conference and were cruising toward a great playoff spot.

For whatever reason, there could be many and we can only speculate, the Blues just never got their legs under them in the playoff restart. Binnington looked good in the first two round-robin games, but seemed shell shocked after that.

His cool persona was missing. His calm, even demeanor was replaced by a fidgety, anxious goaltender.

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Regardless of that, the end of season awards are based on regular season performance. Binnington was one of the Blues that nobody figured had a shot at any hardware.

Interestingly, he finished seventh in the Vezina Trophy voting. Before you get excited about that, he was tied for seventh and had only one, solitary vote for his name.

It was a third-place vote too. So, some writer out there, tossed Binnington’s name onto their ballot and he got a little love – emphasis on little.

The problem Binnington faced was he set the bar impossibly high in his rookie campaign. A goals against average of 1.89 and a .927 save percentage were going to be hard to duplicate.

Binnington’s numbers were not bad in 2019-20. They were not what some expected after he came out so hot from the gate.

In his second season, Binnington posted a .912 save percentage and a goals against of 2.56. Additionally, his quality start percentage dropped from .667 to .560 and he had two fewer shutouts despite playing in 18 more games.

Nevertheless, Binnington’s numbers are not incredibly far off from 2020 Vezina winner Connor Hellebuyck. The Winnipeg Jets goalie had a .922 save percentage and a 2.66 goals against.

So, Binnington allowed fewer total goals than the Vezina winner, and fewer goals per game. His main detraction, if you can call it that, is he faced fewer shots, which affects your save percentage.

This is not to say Binnington deserved the Vezina. Very few would consider him the best goalie in the league, but despite our disappointment in how his season went, it’s not that dissimilar to what the voters picked as the actual best goalie.

The more interesting thing is that Robin Lehner got a second-place vote. While he had a good playoff performance with Vegas, he was mediocre in Chicago (mostly due to bad defense) and three great regular season games with Vegas propped up his numbers. Still, all it took was one second-place vote to pull in three points while Binnington only gets one.

It’s not the finish Binnington would’ve wanted, but at least someone recognized him. Binnington finished fifth in Vezina voting in 2019.