NHL All-Star week is St. Louis’ celebration of hockey heritage and a team that stayed
The last year of St. Louis Blues hockey has been all but a fairy-tale run of success, but the roots and foundation were laid for that success in many decades preceding the run that the franchise’s decision makers could perhaps not have created in their wildest dreams.
Roots trace back to Red Berenson, who was in the lineup at the Centene Community Ice Center for the alumni game on Thursday night.
Berenson, who recently turned 80, was perhaps the first player to blossom into a superstar that St. Louis could call its own. He recorded just 16 goals in the first 185 games of his career with Montreal and the New York Rangers. In the Blues’ inaugural season, he put up 22 tallies in 55 games and took off like a rocket from there.
There’s a line to be drawn back to a local developmental system which saw youth hockey explode in numbers thanks to the excitement which followed Brett Hull’s scoring prowess. That development system allowed players to keep their young children in town as they advanced in their own games, sowing the seeds for a 2016 NHL Draft class which saw five players trained in the St. Louis area be selected in the first round.
One of those players from the 2016 draft was Swansea’s Clayton Keller, who represented the Arizona Coyotes at last year’s All-Star Game. Another was on stage Thursday for media availability, and Matthew Tkachuk told tales of growing up around Enterprise Center and playing with his brother Brady, who was a late edition to the game’s roster.
Matthew and Brady watched their dad, Keith, wind up his career in St. Louis. For years, they were permanent fixtures around any ice surface on which the Blues were skating. Matthew told a story on Thursday night about checking his brother from behind into the boards after a Blues home game, requiring Keith to scoop up the bleeding Brady and drag him back to the training staff for stitches.
Matthew also talked about his favorite players to watch growing up, naming TJ Oshie and David Perron, both of whom will also play this weekend. The success of these Blues traces to them, as well, and to an era in which the team was bottoming out, hoarding draft picks, and sifting through them for the building blocks on which a reliable foundation of success could be built.
Perron’s connection and attraction to the city is well documented, and Oshie maintains a cult following here even after moving on to the Washington Capitals, refining his game, and winning his championship there.
At an event featuring the NHL’s mascots at Union Station’s Fan Fair, a young boy in an Oshie jersey dropped a rubber chicken — substituting for a puck — between a pair of hulking, furry costumes to kick things off. The boy was certainly too young to remember any of Oshie’s time in St. Louis, but he was displaying the memories all the same.
No memories will linger like a championship, and so despite a contract which is winding down and leaving his future uncertain, Alex Pietrangelo will always be the captain which brought the first Stanley Cup to St. Louis.
The iconic image of him shouting wildly as he holds the Cup aloft in front of exploding fireworks will forever be one of the most important in St. Louis sports history, and he graciously took on the role of ambassador on Thursday as he answered questions from assembled fans and was besieged by a throng of autograph seekers.
Those foundational pieces were all eventually properly assembled, but it was a quiet act of defiance that, perhaps, marked the kickoff of this new era of Blues hockey.
When the St. Louis Rams bolted for Los Angeles on January 12, 2016, they did so in the wake of a scathing letter from owner Stan Kroenke which assailed St. Louis as a market that wasn’t viable for professional sports. Kroenke wrote of a stagnant economy and a financial base that simply couldn’t support the deep pockets into which he yearned to dig.
Two nights later, the Blues hosted the Carolina Hurricanes and Blues Chairman Tom Stillman, wearing a Cardinals jacket, walked to center ice with Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III, clad in Blues gear. The two dropped a ceremonial first puck and, though Millstadt’s Tom Calhoun didn’t so much as reference football over the public address system, the message was unmistakable.
To drive the point home, the crowd erupted in a chant of “Kroenke sucks.”
The response of the remaining professional franchises to that departure became a rallying point around which a defiant sense of civic and sporting pride burst forth. It was from that that the Blues emerged as an undeniably central force in the local sports landscape, capped off last summer with the wild championship elation which they so richly deserved.
The NHL All-Star Game is a celebration of the best of hockey, and in St. Louis, that means a perfect way to top off the last year of perfect competitive conditions.
It also means a chance to celebrate a community that, down a long path and through countless unexpected trials, found the champions it chose.
