The St. Louis Blues did not have as happy an ending to their season as they had the year prior. They were eliminated from the playoffs and had to play the last three games of the season with nothing to show for it.
Overall, the year was a letdown, and it featured some good, bad, and ugly moments. But what exactly went wrong in this one? Where did things go sideways?
Outside of the subheadings listed below, it is important to remember that the opening night saw a 5-0 bludgeoning from the Minnesota Wild. That really set the tone.
Key injuries
Robert Thomas, the team's most valuable player, was banged up a good bit this season. Jimmy Snuggerud, who finished right behind Thomas in the points race, was also sitting on the sidelines for quite a while in the middle of the 2025-26 campaign.
Those are two of many injuries sustained this season, and each one had a significant impact. It is hard to string together wins when your best and most talented players are not on the ice.
Line shuffling to find what worked
The hope was that head coach Jim Montgomery used the offseason prior to this season that just concluded to come up with perfect line combinations. Instead, it was probably one of the most confusing and understandably frustrating line-shuffling escapades that any coach was running this season.
Without having to really crunch the numbers on this one, there is a good chance that every single player played with one another in some sort of facet this season. Montgomery tried and tries to find what worked, and unfortunately, it took until the very end of the season to find out his true first line of Snuggerud, Thomas, and Dylan Holloway, which helped smooth out the other three forward lines.
Too little too late, and too much as well.
False identity
The Blues went into the 2025-26 season with a contender tag placed on their heads. In 2024-25, they set the franchise record for consecutive wins with 12, and then took the Presidents' Trophy winners, the Winnipeg Jets, to the final seconds of game seven.
That is where the false identity sets in, and ultimately dooms this team. They are not as good as we thought they were, and it showed in 2025-26.
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