The 2024-25 NHL season is fully behind us, and St. Louis Blues fans are looking forward to the NHL Draft and the start of free agency in July. The only remaining things on the 2024-25 calendar are the days with the Cup dates for each player on the Florida Panthers.
Of course, on social media, most of the complaints about the Panthers are nonsensical. It's the usual nonsense about how the league should be embarrassed that a team that can't even have ice outdoors can win the sport's championship. There is also the ridiculous argument about tax breaks that conveniently forgets that Florida teams have been pretty bad in all sports, with the Tampa Bay Lightning and Panthers' runs recently being more of an aberration rather than the norm.
However, the Panthers winning their second Stanley Cup does make me sad. It's not because the Panthers are the team that won, however.
It makes me sad because it is a reminder that teams capable of winning consecutive titles don't come along incredibly often, and teams that have a legitimate claim to be a dynasty, if they can win another, are even more rare. So, what does that have to do with our Blues?
The Blues should have been in that spot just a few short years ago. For those of us that waited multple decades of our lives to see the Blues win the Stanley Cup, just getting that one could be enough.
How many of us said the words, or something similar to "I can die happy now" after the team won it's one and only Cup? I'd imagine it's pretty high. When your team goes over 50 years of existence and only has that one championship, it's understandable to be accepting of just having that one and letting it be.
The reality is we are human. We're satisfied in the moment, but as soon as you give us hope for more, we want more.
The 2019-20 St. Louis Blues were going to be our more. They were designed to win it again.
The Blues brought back the entire team that won the 2019 Stanley Cup, with the exception of Joel Edmundson, who was traded to Carolina for Justin Faulk, and Pat Maroon. St. Louis was also without the services of Vladimir Tarasenko due to his shoulder injury, but the rest of the team stepped up.
Even without Tarasenko and Faulk having a down year offensively due to being with a new team, the Blues won 42 games and had 94 points in 71 games. When the league shut down due to COVID, the Blues were the best team in the Western Conference - two points up on Colorado and trailing only Boston for the most points in the league.
Ryan O'Reilly was still playing like a top-line center with 61 points. David Perron and Brayden Schenn had 25 goals, and Jaden Schwartz had 22, giving the Blues the potential for three 30-goal scorers, if the season went its full length and Schwartz went on a heater.
Additionally, Alex Pietrangelo had 16 goals, which remains a career high. The Blues were also seeing Tyler Bozak and Zach Sanford punching above their weight with 13 and 16 goals, respectively.
Only five teams in the entire league had allowed fewer goals than the Blues. Jordan Binnington had 30 wins, a .912 save percentage, and a 2.56 goals against average.
On top of the expected offense from Petro and Colton Parayko, Vince Dunn was on pace to have 10 or more goals if the season was played in full. St. Louis was doing an amazing job of controlling the puck as well.
When the season stopped, Pietrangelo led the team with a measly 45 giveaways. For context, Pietrangelo just had 106 turnovers in 2024-25, and the top free agent this summer, Mitch Marner, had 106 as well.
Everything was lined up for this team to win. The only thing that derailed them was a global pandemic. How St. Louis Blues can you get?
You have a team capable of winning another championship and maybe more if they were allowed to build on all that in a normal manner. Instead, we got the pandemic break and a team that was completely disengaged once they went into the playoff bubble.
Naysayers will point out how good Colorado was, as well as Tampa and Boston. I point out that the Blues already beat Boston and, at the time, were still at least as physical, if not a more physical team than Tampa had.
If the Blues win that year, you still run the risk of not affording all your players going forward. However, without the pandemic, the salary cap keeps going up, and the Blues still have the freedom to spend up to it.
Without the flat cap due to the pandemic, the Blues probably have the money to afford to keep Pietrangelo and never end up bringing in Torey Krug. As much as social media complains about Doug Armstrong, I think he continued to show how good a GM he is and was by supplementing a championship roster the same way the Panthers have instead of the team crashing out, costing Craig Berube his job and forcing them to sell off pending unrestricted free agents.
This is all theoretical, of course. Since we didn't get an ending to the season and a completely odd playoff structure, we simply don't know how things would have played out.
I will always contend that those Blues were going to win it again. You had a hot, playoff-proven goaltender. You had guys stepping up for the missing offense of Tarasenko, and the defense was keeping the puck instead of handing it to the opposition in the worst spots, as we've seen the last couple of seasons.
Like the Panthers, the Blues would have made the moves they needed to keep winning instead of being forced into a refresh. Everything would have been different.
The Blues didn't write the script, but they showed that you could win with a team-first concept without any true superstars. They showed that you could win by bullying opponents instead of just outscoring them.
Tampa won by copying the Blues' style, picking up gritty players like Maroon. The Panthers won by forechecking and wearing their opponents into dust, very similar to what the Blues did in 2019.
The 2019-20 Blues were still built to get that style done in the playoffs. You do have to take into account that the team would've been without Jay Bouwmeester, who had his health scare before the season was 60 games old, but that team had the mental will to survive it at the time. The pandemic break and uncertainty took that all away.
A second Blues championship could completely change the landscape. Without that initial Cup in the bubble, maybe Tampa never gets over the hump.
We'll never know now. Who knows if the Blues will ever win another one in most of our lifetimes either.
Everyone thinks everything will last forever, but it almost never does in sports. Everyone thought the Milwaukee Bucks would go on a run once Giannis won, but they've all but disappeared. The Avalanche were poised to dominate the league, but they've had early exits every season since they won.
The Blues could have been the Panthers before Florida even won its first Cup. It's sad to think about it since the circumstances could not be changed, and the team was never given a full chance to show whether they would have repeated or not.