The Blues accomplished the hard part. They altered the dynamic in their locker room for the better. They avoided any sort of sell-off that might have setback their rebuilding efforts. They accelerated the development of young players, individually, and the progress of their core as a group.
Blues fall painfully short of advancing, but make great strides
Post-Dispatch sportswriter Tom Timmermann joined columnist Jeff Gordon to discuss the agonizing end to the Blues-Jets series, but also the better times to come.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Now comes the harder part.
They’ve got to find a way to keep this ship — general manager Doug Armstrong likened an NHL franchise to a tanker in the ocean — on course and free from costly deviations that might prevent them from getting close to their destination.
The question that will define this period of Blues hockey is whether this season served as a turning point or just an exciting run that raised hopes and expectations only to fall frustratingly flat.
Much like their in-season turnaround, that answer will rest on the shoulders of players vastly more than on head coach Jim Montgomery or Armstrong.
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“We grew as a team, definitely,” Blues captain Brayden Schenn said. “Guys have taken massive steps. Whether it was maturity or leadership or holding each other accountable.
Blues forward Brayden Schenn celebrates his goal against Jets goaltender Connor Hellebuyck during second-period action of Game 6 of the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs on Friday, May 2, 2025, at Enterprise Center.
Laurie Skrivan, Post-Dispatch
“At the end of the day, when you do that off the ice you feel more connected and more together. That translated on the ice. We feel like we have taken a step in the right direction, and we have to continue to do that in the locker room.”
The combination of what players have said and what they’ve stopped just short of saying makes it pretty clear. The team was plagued by selfish play, a lack of buying into the system and a willingness to give in to frustration when things didn’t go their way.
Those sentiments were echoed by multiple players in different ways. It was present when Pavel Buchnevich referred to the team starting to play more “as a team” and not “player by player” or the uniformity of the style of play on the ice across each of their four forward lines after the 4 Nations break.
It also came through in Robert Thomas talked about the aggravation of losing leading to players trying to “change things” on their own, which led to a bad stretch of games and a lack of confidence.
“Confidence is a big thing,” Thomas said. “It’s easy to lose, and it’s tough to gain back. It takes time. It takes a lot of effort.”
Reading between the lines, it sounded like that lack of confidence extended to confidence in each other and their systems as well as individual confidence.
If they’d been a team full of youngsters, they probably would not have gotten over that hump. Had the players not got that righted, nothing else would’ve mattered.
“I think as a group we relied a lot on our older guys,” Thomas said. “Guys like (Ryan Suter), (Justin Faulk), Schenner, and those guys really showed the way and taught a lot of us the culture that we need. I think it made a huge impact on speeding up that process.”
Schenn, who has played more than 1,000 NHL games in a career that includes stints with three franchises, offered the most bluntly honest assessment of the changes that had to take place.
“We feel like we have built something back up in our locker room where guys are going out there and playing hard for one another, playing hard for the organization, the city, the fans, a little bit of everything,” Schenn said. “That’s what ultimately wins you hockey games.
“You have the feeling in the room — you’ve been on teams where there’s a little bit of fakeness or whatever the word might be. Where guys are putting on their gear and sometimes guys play a little bit for themselves. We feel like in this locker room guys are playing for one another. When you play for one another, you can have the ability to put on runs like we did down the stretch to get us into the playoffs.”
The previous dynamic within the club led to a shuffling of coaches from Craig Berube to Drew Bannister to Montgomery. That dynamic also put the Blues on the verge of a roster reshuffling before the 4 Nations break.
During his end of season news conference, Armstrong said he’d told his counterparts around the league that the Blues would likely be sellers at the trade deadline depending upon the team’s performance coming out of that break.
“Yeah, there were times when I second-guessed if we had the right group together,” Armstrong said. “To their credit, they proved that we did.”
The Blues won five of seven games between the restart after the 4 Nations break and the trading deadline. That provided a stay of execution, then they kept rolling.
From the restart to the end of the NHL season, the Blues went 19-4-3 and shared the most wins in the NHL with the Los Angeles Kings and Toronto Maple Leafs. Along the way, the Blues posted a franchise-record 12-game win streak. They also won 12 straight home games to end the regular season.
They went from eight points out of a playoff spot to making the playoffs and coming within three seconds of advancing over the Presidents’ Trophy winning Winnipeg Jets.
Now, it’s about keeping that team dynamic and maintaining that renewed “culture” that led to that run.
They must do that without the galvanizing effect that comes with the trade deadline and the looming specter of potential roster shakeup. They must keep that “culture” as everyone goes their separate ways during the offseason and as inevitable roster changes take place going forward.
“You’ve just got to continue to take that momentum and bring it into the summer, bring it into your training, bring it into how you think about the game and how you play as a team and bring it for next year,” Thomas said.
Hopefully, they can do that. It would be shameful for all that change to evaporate in the summer heat.
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