IN SPORTS: SHARKS FALL SHORT OF STANLEY CUP FINALS
ST. LOUIS — The long, long journey for the Blues, both in the team’s history and in this season, came to an amazing ending on Tuesday night at Enterprise Center.
For the first time in 49 years, the Blues are back in the Stanley Cup finals, an amazing turnaround for a team that started the season with high hopes and which had the fewest points in the league on Jan. 3. They defeated the San Jose Sharks, 5-1, in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals, and now they move on to the Stanley Cup Final to face the Bruins in Boston on Monday. The last time the Blues made the finals, in 1970, they faced the Bruins.
The Blues are the only remaining team from the league’s first expansion in 1967-68 not to have won the Stanley Cup and they have played more games than any other NHL team without winning the Cup.
They did it with an interim coach in Craig Berube and a fourth-string goalie, Jordan Binnington, who barely figured in the team’s plans at the start of the season but whose outstanding play in the second half of the season allowed the rest of the team to regain its composure and go on a clubrecord 11-game winning streak.
As Blues fans would have expected, it didn’t come easy. Protecting a twogoal lead starting the third period, the Sharks came at them in waves, and it was almost 12 minutes before the Blues had a shot on goal in the period. But the Blues and their fans unleashed a deafening roar when San Jose’s Gustav Nyquist tipped in a pass from Tyler Bozak with 6:55 to go in the period. At last, the fans felt a chance to acknowledge what now seemed inevitable. With fans chanting “We want the Cup,” Ivan Barbashev scored an empty-net goal to finish things off.
At the final horn, streamers fell from the ceiling at Enterprise Center, David Perron picked up the puck and Gloria, the team’s anthem, blared on the PA system.
The Blues scored twice in the first period to take a 2-0 lead and after San Jose cut the lead to 2-1 in the second, Brayden Schenn scored his first goal since Game 5 of the opening round series with Winnipeg to restore the lead to two goals.
Schenn had been snake bit throughout the playoffs since then, and had a great chance earlier in the second period when he came through the slot alone with a pass from Vladimir Tarasenko but couldn’t beat San Jose goalie Martin Jones.
This time, the Blues were on a power play after Justin Braun was called for hooking Robert Thomas as Thomas cut across the crease. With 10 seconds to go on a power play in which the Blues had trouble getting set up in the zone, Alex Pietrangelo took a shot from the blue line that Jones stopped. Schenn pulled the rebound away from Jones and then shot it past the diving goalie. The look of relief for Schenn was evident. He threw his stick to the ice and let out a yell as his teammates rushed to him.
The assist for Pietrangelo gave him 13 points in the postseason, a record for a Blues defenseman, and his assist was his 11th, tying him with Joe
Micheletti for the team mark.
With the assist on the play, Thomas became the sixth teenager in the past 20 years with six points in a postseason, a list that includes Nathan MacKinnon, Tyler Seguin and Joe Thornton.
The goal made the Blues 2 for 2 on the power play in the game.
San Jose got its goal from Dylan Gambrell, in the game because of the injuries to Tomas Hertl and Joe Pavelski. He got the puck for a breakaway after the Blues had nearly scored at the other end and he beat Binnington from outside, the first goal Binnington had allowed since the third period of Game 4.