Blues’ Stanley Cup championship was unprecedented, as was rise of goalie Binnington
The fourth anniversary of a significant night in St. Louis Blues history is approaching, and without effort to recognize it, it may have slipped past far more quietly than it deserves.
On Jan. 14, 2016, the Blues came out listless and flat at home against the Carolina Hurricanes, ultimately losing 4-1. Despite Jake Allen being out of the lineup with a lower body injury, then-Blues coach Ken Hitchcock decided goaltender Brian Elliott had seen enough abuse in the net after Carolina’s third goal, which came with 12:47 left on the clock in the third period.
Elliott was replaced by a 22-year-old named Jordan Binnington, who stopped three of the four shots he saw in his NHL debut. That game would be Binnington’s last in the NHL for nearly three full years, until he came in in relief of Allen on Dec. 16, 2018.
In between, he bounced from Chicago to Providence to San Antonio, all the while resisting organizational attempts to ship him off to the ECHL and clearing NHL waivers more than once. If he could’ve been had by another team for nothing, he certainly would have been available in trade.
Why, though, would there have been interest? Every organization has its own tweener goalies. There’s no sense in taking on someone else’s project.
Binnington’s emergence came with a shutout in Philadelphia last Jan. 7. The story of that game became the stuff of legends; it was on that road trip that a jewelry dealing friend of a few players introduced them to a private club in which the Eagles were being watched and bad 80s disco was being played during the commercial breaks.
The players, in the middle of a long season trending the wrong direction, got wrapped up in a song, and shouted for “Gloria” to be played. And it was played frequently and for months to come.
Despite playing in just 32 games last season, Binnington was the runner up for the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s rookie of the year. He finished fifth for the Vezina, awarded to the top goalie. He was 10th in voting for the Hart Trophy, given to the NHL’s MVP. He made 26 postseason starts en route to the franchise’s first Stanley Cup and was the runner up for the Conn Smythe Trophy, given to the postseason MVP.
Binnington’s story is one that’s without precedent in the annals of NHL history and will almost certainly never be duplicated.
Skeptics compared him at first to Andrew Hammond, whose outrageous run in 2015 ended with a thud in the playoffs. Steve Penney played just four games for Montreal in the 1983-84 season before blasting through 15 outstanding postseason starts. He had one more good season in the NHL before fading into obscurity.
Meteoric rises have happened before, but riding such a rise to sustained success is a new proposition.
Four years after his first taste of the NHL and one year after he asserted himself as an all-time figure in St. Louis sports lore, it’s fair to wonder what the future holds for Binnington. He was selected as an All-Star representative for the upcoming game to be hosted by the Blues despite falling outside the league’s top 10 in both save percentage and goals against average.
His impressive placement in the goalie wins column is reflective of the team’s success, and though advanced stats for goaltenders are still in their nascent stages, he doesn’t appear in the top 10 for goals saved above average. He’s barely among the top third of the league in goaltender point shares.
Rather than the highlight reel savior that he at first appeared to be, Binnington is instead settling in as a stable presence who has the ability to steal games behind a top-tier defensive unit. The Blues have excelled at shot and chance suppression over the last calendar year, and as the team’s primary starting goaltender, Binnington has been a beneficiary of those efforts.
There’s something to be said for the comfort a team feels in playing in front of a goaltender and the confidence which may radiate outward from the crease.
Allen, for all his flashes of high level skill, has seemingly not provided the reliability which allows his team to display that confidence. Binnington, always cool and famously not nervous, looks like he belongs in the net.
Wry jokes from January of 2019 about Binnington leading the Stanley Cup parade were formed into stunning reality just six months later as he commandeered musical instruments and electric scooters, drinking in every ounce of celebration he could reach and likely a few produced by Anheuser-Busch.
His legend, already cemented, was crystallized. His story will be one told by people in St. Louis and more broadly throughout hockey for years. He’s an impeccable example of determination and seizing your moment when it becomes available.
He’s also a goalie who has been good, if not great, at keeping the puck out of the net in his second NHL season. For the Blues, for now, that’s more than good enough.
