Last year, the Capitals finally won teh Stanley Cup, a good decade after their first trip to the playoffs in the Ovechkin era. It was a triumph of patience, keeping the main gang together past umpteen disheartening, corrosive playoff defeats. So many game seven losses, most of them at home. Three different #1 seeds frittered away without even reaching the Conference Final.
No matter, they kept Ovi, Backy and Kuzy together, and along with Holtby (let's skip past the part that he didn't start the first two games in last year's playoffs), they won their cup.
A year later, the Blues won their cup, also after a long decade of playoff turmoil, if not as maddening as the Capitals. 10 years ago, the Blues made the playoffs and quickly got swept away by the Canucks. That team had Alex Pietrangelo and David Perron on it. That said, most of the 2008-09 Blues are long gone. The real current Blues started in 2012, when they skied to a 110-point season giving up just 165 goals. With that team, you start adding more names, like Alex Steen and Jaden Schwartz.
Those teams also had their fair share of players that have been lost by the wayside, old flotsam and jetsam of Blues runs past. Guys like TJ Oshie, David Backes, Patrick Berglund, Kevin Shattenkirk and others. The Blues have had a lot of good players over the years, have had better years, and kept losing to, simply put, better teams. There's the back-to-back losses to the Kings in '12 and '13, the losses to lower-ranked Blackhaws in '14. They finally won a first round series in 2016, beating Chicago, and then they lost in seven to Dallas. It was no better in 2017. and then last season they missed the playoffs for the first time in eight years. Somehow, someway, despite that background and then being literally the worst team in teh league in January, they end the year with that beautiful shiny trophy.
This team had a few stars that had been through a lot. Vladimir Tarasenko first came on the scene in 2013 with a ridiculous combination of pace and size. He changed the Blues, even through shedding top players like Shattenkirk and Oshie in back to back years. They added other key cogs like Colton Parayko (2016), Robert Bertuzzo (2014), Brayden Schenn (2017), and others over the years. This was not an untalented team, just a weird one taht again was literally the worst team in the league in January.
We've never seen anything like this - maybe the closest I can remember was the Astros in 2005 going from 15-30 to a World Series appearance. This team was not good, until overnight a switch clicked. You can credit rookie Jordan Binnington, but it was more than that. Having Hart candidate Ryan O'Reilly helped tremendously, a brilliant acquisition as he was reborn being rescued for Buffalo.
The Blues also were incredibly resilient in the playoffs, winning three games in Winnipeg, a place that was nigh impossible to win in during last year's playoffs. They won a thrilling double OT game to beat Dallas, dominating the last two periods. They recovered from the ludicrous missed hand-pass goal against San Jose to win three straight to take the Western Conference Finals. In the Cup Final, they won three games in Boston, including recovering from blowing game 6 at home with a chance to clinch by winning in Game 7 in Boston, dominating the game 4-1.
The Blues should be decent next year, but if Binnington turns into a pumpkin, or their depth doesn't match its 2019 heights, or if Berube's message starts losing its impact, they could easily be a one-year wonder. Even if that happens, they've done something truly exciting, winning a first Cup in a truly dramatic series. Sometimes, going through a decade of playoff struggles does in fact make you stronger, and if anything I'm sure makes the final reaching of the summit more rewarding than you could imagine.
