Since their establishment in 1967, the St. Louis Blues have been a good NHL team. Not only has St…read more Louis won a Stanley Cup recently (2019), but they're a perennial playoff team, have won 10 division titles, and through the last complete season (2019-20), they rank in the top 10 all-time in points percentage. Outside the Original Six, who joined the league from 1917 to 1926, the Blues have the most playoff appearances (44) of any active team.
Before winning the Cup in 2019, the Blues had gone exactly 50 seasons without an NHL championship. In the Finals that year, St. Louis went the distance with Boston. The Blues edged the Bruins, four games to three, and won Game 7, 4-1, on the road at TD Garden in Boston. In his first year in St. Louis, center Ryan O'Reilly won the Conn Smythe Trophy (playoffs MVP). "The Factor" came up clutch in Games 4 through 7 of the Finals, going on a four-game goal-scoring streak.
After the Blues fired third-year head coach Mike Yeo only a little over a month into the 2018-19 season, Craig Berube went on to become only the second interim coach to win the Stanley Cup. Less than two weeks after winning the championship, Berube signed a three-year contract to remain head coach of the Blues through the 2021-22 season.
Two of the greatest players in franchise history are right-winger Brett Hull, who played for the Blues from 1988 to 1998, and center Bernie Federko, who played for the Blues from 1976 to 1989. Federko was drafted seventh overall in the 1976 NHL Amateur Draft. He was the only player out of the 135 picked that year to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame (2002). "The Golden Brett" joined Federko in the Hall seven years later (2009). Hull and Federko currently hold the top two spots in points, goals, and assists in St. Louis regular season and playoff history. Their numbers - 16 and 24, respectively - were retired by the franchise along with five others.
The Blues have had only two home arenas: (1) St. Louis Arena, a.k.a. the Checkerdome, across from Forest Park, where the team played from 1967 to 1994, and (2) the Enterprise Center, located in Downtown West, where the team has played since the facility first opened as the Kiel Center in 1994. Due to the 1994-95 lockout, the Blues didn't actually start playing in the Kiel Center until January 1995.