St. Louis Blues: A Lament For The 2019 Stanley Cup Champions

At this time five years ago, St. Louis Blues fans were still getting occasional updates about who was spending time with the Stanley Cup the franchise had just won. We were all preparing for the upcoming season too, wondering if this team had what it took to repeat.

Things started out well enough before it all came crashing down. We'll get to that part in a moment.

The Blues raced out to a fantastic start and were, again, one of the best teams in the entire NHL. When the regular season was forced to a grinding halt, the Blues had a record of 42-19-10 with 94 points in 71 games.

They almost surely would have finished with more wins and more points than the season when they actually won the championship. 2018-19 finished at 45-28-9 with 99 points. 2019-20 was the second best win percentage of Craig Berube's coaching career with the Note as well.

Unfortunately, the Blues lost Jay Bouwmeester to a heart condition late in the season and then the Covid pandemic happened. Not making light of all the things that happened during that time, but that's the most St. Louis Blues way to go out. You have a championship caliber team thwarted by a global shutdown.

The league had their playoffs in the bubble, but the Blues were never the same. There were rumors of who had had Covid, who was recovering and all that. The bottom line was the Blues got knocked out in the first round.

While Game 1 and Game 6 were blowouts, the rest were relatively close. However, it just never felt like the Blues had it in them. It didn't feel like they had their heart in it.

So, a team that was on pace to finish first in the division and likely first in the Western Conference, crashed and burned. We've seen other teams do that in full seasons, but it felt like it was stolen from us.

For anyone under 50, they had waited their entire lives for a championship. For those over 50, they had waited more than 50 years. Then, you have a team more than capable of repeating and the team didn't get a normal run at it. That's the history of the Blues for you.

What poured some fat salt crystals on that wound was how it was slowly stripped away after that. The Blues remained a contender, but it was never the same because the team tried to change.

Doug Armstrong got bitten by the speed bug again and tried to alter the look of the team to copy teams that had not just won. He became overly worried about competing in speed skating competitions with the Colorado Avalanche instead of sticking to what won for him.

I still contend that Armstrong is one of, if not the best NHL GM in the last decade - perhaps this century. It is only 24 years old, after all.

Nevertheless, the way the teams have won the last few years proved Armstrong was incorrect. You could argue the Avlanche were an exception, but the teams that won after the Blues won because they played like the Blues.

When St. Louis won in 2019, they basically ran their opponents into the ground physically. The best example of that was the San Jose Sharks, who did not even have a full roster of players on the bench by the time the series was winding down. St. Louis battered and bruised them so much, they looked like a MASH unit on skates.

However, the Blues started looking for the next Cale Makar. Due to contract negotiations going sour, Alex Pietrangelo was allowed to walk and the Blues brought in Torey Krug. Add him to a unit that had added Justin Faulk and also lost Joel Edmundson and Bouwmeester and you've gotten a lot smaller.

The Blues went too far the other way, too quickly. Meanwhile, Tampa Bay stocked up on gritty players, the Vegas Golden Knights had some monsters on defense and the Florida Panthers got their guys to buy into a Berube-like style that punished their opponents.

Those teams won Cups playing a style and having players like the Blues won with. Meanwhile, the Blues are in the midst of a re-tool and trying to make the playoffs for the first time in two seasons.

Nothing will ever take away the wonderful memories we all had five years ago. It just ended in the most Blues way possible.

You had a team that could have, and I believe would have, repeated as champion and it's taken away by a pandemic. You have a style of play that fits the coach and was proven to win a championship if you play that way in the playoffs, but one of the best GM's in the league tried to copy instead of letting other teams copy him.

The Blues had a steady, if not borderline dominating defensive unit and they lose a key player to a health condition and got a lot smaller for the sake of puck movement. The franchise mishandled the surgery and rehab of one of their prime goal scorers and that relationship was eventually pushed past the point of no return. Instead of having someone that might challenge for the all-time goals total, you have to trade that guy away to start a retool.

Almost everything has been stripped away. Only Jordan Binnington, Brayden Schenn, Robert Thomas, and Oskar Sundqvist remain.

Sunny got traded and returned, Thomas was a part of that championship team but now the team is depending on him. Schenn is the team captain, but you feel like he's on the backside of his career even though he's not that old. Binnington is a whipping boy online, but he's the only one keeping the team in games when the defense is pourous.

These kinds of things happen to a lot of franchises, but it just felt like the Blues were poised for more. We had dreams of being the next LA Kings or Chicago Blackhawks where, even if the Blues didn't repeat, we would challenge for another Cup or two over the course of five or six years.

Instead, five years later, we are arguing whether the Blues can even make the playoffs. Being a championship contender is a far-off dream at the moment.

The Blues will eventually return to their perennial playoff contender status, but who knows if they'll ever be that kind of championship contender again. It took over 50 years to win the first, so let's hope it's not another 50 before we get a second.

For now, just remember those fond moments. Five years isn't that long, but it feels both like yesterday and also a lifetime ago when we think of that fantastic feeling.