0 for 50 and counting ... and counting ...
The St. Louis Blues’ championship drought is moving into elite company
A Stanley Cup champion is about to be determined, and the winner will be the Vegas Golden Knights, who are the first team in major North American professional sports since the Blues to reach the Stanley Cup final in their first season, or the Washington Capitals, a team whose level of frustration rivals only a few teams because it joined the National Hockey League in 1974-75 and has never won a Stanley Cup.
As it turns out, one of the teams whose frustration it doesn’t rival is the Blues, who began play in 1967-68, giving them an eightyear head start on the Capitals when it comes to disappointment. If Capitals fans are long suffering, Blues fans are longer suffering.
The Blues just completed their 50th season on ice — thanks to the lost lockout season, they’ve been around for 51 years — and if that seems like a long time to go without winning anything, it’s because, in American sports today, it is a long time. Of 123 teams in the four major North American leagues (we’re not counting Major League Soccer only because it hasn’t been around long enough to put anyone on these lists), only 10 of them have championship droughts longer than the Blues. (Four more, including the Toronto Maple Leafs, who won their last title the season before the Blues joined the NHL, are also 0 for 50.)
Six of those 10 teams are in the National Football League, which seems to be more conducive to droughts like this, but most notably most of them have, at some point in their history, won a championship. Some of them won those titles in the AFL before it merged with the NFL, but their victory parade, assuming they had one, was probably just as sweet.
That condition, combining both age and a perfect record of defeat, is something that sets Blues fans and their level of frustration apart from most other teams: While there have been moments of jubilation for the Blues, the ultimate prize has eluded them.
Sure, being a Cleveland Indians fan can be tough, and the team has gone 69 years without winning the World Series, but there was a point in that team’s history where there was a championship to be celebrated, something a grandparent or greatgrandparent can sit a child on their knee and recall. (There may even be pictures.)
The Blues have a Monday Night Miracle, and, two nights later, a season-ending playoff loss, as their high point. Or maybe it’s Troy Brouwer scoring to beat the Blackhawks in the first round of the playoffs. Or Curtis Joseph fighting Tim Cheveldae. In any case, the story never ends well.
Only two teams in the NHL, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association and NFL have a longer 0-fer in the history of the franchise than the Blues. The Texas Rangers, who entered this world in 1961, and the Atlanta Falcons, who started in 1966, have never won a title. That’s it.
Every other team that was in existence when the Blues first stepped on the ice has won a championship at some point. (Two other teams, the Cincinnati Bengals and the Phoenix Suns, have also gone 50 seasons without winning a championship, but the Blues are older chronologically thanks to the lockout.)
And really, Falcons fans are the only ones who can say they’ve had it worse for longer than Blues’ fans. The Rangers moved from Washington, where they had been the Senators, to the Dallas area for the 1972 season. For a Rangers fan, their angst goes back only 46 years.
The Falcons and Rangers share a similar pain: Both have come really close in recent years to winning. The Falcons blew a 25-point third-quarter lead and lost to the Patriots in overtime in the Super Bowl after the 2016 season. The Rangers, well, twice they were an out away against the Cardinals in Game 6 of the 2011 World Series. David Freese, Lance Berkman and Tom Brady are all that stand between the Blues and being at the top of that list.
That, however, raises another question: Would you feel better if you at least came close? Not only have the Blues not won a Cup, they haven’t been to the finals in a long time.
The Blues reached the Stanley Cup final in each of their first three seasons, thanks to the NHL placing the six expansion teams in one division. It has been 47 seasons since the Blues got to the final, and only two teams — the Washington Nationals-Montreal Expos, born in 1969, and the L.A.San Diego Clippers-Buffalo Braves, born in ’70, have gone longer without getting that close to their first title. But again, both of those teams have relocated, keeping one fan base from the total burden.
Based on the Blues’ consistent regular-season successes and playoff appearances, the Blues probably should have won two, maybe three, Stanley Cups in their history. Seven times in those 50 seasons, the Blues have finished with more points than the eventual Stanley Cup champion, including four of the past seven seasons.
Four of the other six teams that entered the NHL along with the Blues have won the Stanley Cup, all but one of them more than once. (The other team to enter the league in that expansion, the California-Oakland Seals, moved to Cleveland in 1976 and eventually merged with the Minnesota North Stars, ending that team’s lineage. The North Stars eventually moved to Dallas and are the team from the second six to have one title, won, as fate would have it, with Ken Hitchcock as their coach. It really is a small world after all.)
The Blues’ 50-season wait for their first title pales compared to some other franchises. Most of the founding teams in the big four leagues won titles fairly quickly. Of the first 16 teams in Major League Baseball, only three had not won a World Series within 50 years: the Philadelphia Phillies wouldn’t win their first until 1980, the Brooklyn Dodgers didn’t win their first until 1955, their 66th season, and the Baltimore Orioles (nee St. Louis Browns) until 1966. (Once they won, the Dodgers went on to four titles in 11 seasons, so there’s always that.) From the first wave of baseball expansion, the Houston Astros went 55 years before finally getting a title in 2017.
And if you want optimism, that’s where you’ll find it. Droughts have been coming to an end all over the place lately. The Red Sox ended an 85-year drought in 2004. The White Sox ended an 87-year drought in 2005, and the Cubs ended the wait of all waits, 107 years, in 2016. The Eagles had gone 77 seasons without winning a title before winning the Super Bowl this year. The Cleveland Cavaliers, who came into the NBA in 1970, won the 2016 championship. The Capitals could end their 42-season drought.
So, if all good things must come to an end, so, presumably the bad ones do, too. History says everybody wins eventually. But it doesn’t hurt to be patient.