Welcome in. It is just so great to have you with
us today. Absolutely. Glad you're here. Whether
you are prepping for a big meeting, trying to
catch up on your sports history, or you're just
intensely curious about how massive organizations
function and sometimes completely dysfunction,
you are in the exact right place. You really
are. Today, we have a deep dive that feels less
like a historical timeline and more like, I don't
know, a Hollywood script that would get rejected
by a studio for being way too unbelievable. Far
-fetched, right. Exactly. We are looking at a
comprehensive Wikipedia article detailing the
history of the St. Louis Blues hockey franchise.
And it genuinely is a staggering narrative from
top to bottom. Our mission for you today is to
explore how a National Hockey League team that
was essentially designed from day one to be a
lovable loser for a rival city somehow survived.
Yeah. And we aren't just talking about surviving
a few bad seasons. We are talking about surviving
near bankruptcy. A literal abandonment by its
corporate owners and a half century championship
drought. A 52 year drought. Right. All to eventually
pull off one of the most miraculous midseason
turnarounds in the history of professional sports.
OK, let's unpack this, because to understand
the miracle, we have to start with the incredibly
cynical reason this team even exists in the first
place. Oh, it's incredibly cynical. Right. I
was looking through the source material on the
early years and it seems like they completely
shattered that lovable loser expectation right
out of the gate. But how did the team even end
up in St. Louis? What's fascinating here is that
the St. Louis Blues were not born out of some
desperate local demand for professional hockey.
They weren't. Not at all. Back in 1967, the NHL
decided to expand from the original 16s to 12.
Now, the owners of the Chicago Blackhawks at
the time, James D. Norris and Arthur Wurtz, they
also happened to own the St. Louis Arena. Ah,
okay. And this building was 38 years old. It
was decrepit. It hadn't been well maintained
since the 1940s. They desperately wanted to unload
this massive real estate liability. So they just
needed a tenant. Woos. They pushed the NHL to
put an expansion team in St. Louis, a city that
had not even submitted a formal expansion bid
to the league. Wait, wait. So the owners of the
Chicago team forced the league to put a franchise
in St. Louis just to get rid of a bad building.
Exactly. And their motive went even deeper than
real estate. How so? Well, the Blackhawks had
won the championship in 1961, right? They were
doing phenomenal numbers at the box office. They
felt that by establishing a team in St. Louis,
they could create a reliable regional rival.
A punching bag. Yes. Essentially a lovable loser
akin to baseball's Cubs and Cardinals dynamic
at the time. They wanted a team they could just
beat up on to entertain the Chicago fans while
simultaneously dumping their crumbling arena.
onto the new St. Louis ownership group. That
is just wild. A franchise born entirely out of
a real estate scam and a desire for an easy win.
Pretty much. But the first owners, the Salomon
family, Sid Salomon Jr. and his son Sid III,
they completely defied this expectation, at least
off the ice. They really did. They buy the team,
they spend millions renovating that old arena
to expand it to 15 ,000 seats, and then they
decide to treat their players like absolute royalty.
Which was unheard of. Completely unheard of.
Back then, hockey players were often treated
like expendable commodities. But the Salomons
were giving players cars. Free cars. Free cars.
They were signing them to massive deferred contracts.
They were even paying for the players to take
vacations down in Florida. That's amazing. And
the players felt so respected that they decided
the only way to pay the owners back was to leave
everything they had on the ice. So how did that
actually translate into their first few seasons?
It translated into immediate success. though
highly unusual success. You see, the 1967 expansion
was structured in a very specific way. The NHL
put all six new expansion teams into their own
separate division, the West Division. To keep
them away from the original six. Exactly. This
was designed to ensure that the new teams had
an equal chance of reaching the playoffs without
being instantly crushed by the established franchises
in the East. Makes sense. So under their legendary
coach, Scotty Bowman, the Blues came out of the
gates swinging. They dominated this new division.
They became the only expansion team to compile
a winning record. And they made it all the way
to the Stanley Cup final in their very first
season. That sounds like a complete fairytale
ending for a team that wasn't even supposed to
exist. It does sound like a fairytale. But here
is where the harsh reality check hits. Making
the final meant they finally had to play the
champion of the established division. The original
16s. Right. In their first year, they were swept
by the heavily favored Montreal Canadiens. Ouch.
The next year, 1969, they make the final again,
swept again by Montreal. Oh, man. The third year,
1970, they make it back, swept by the Boston
Bruins. Three sweeps. That is three consecutive
trips to the Scaling Cup final in their first
three years of existence. And they did not win
a single game in any of those series. Just think
about the psychological toll of that. For you
listening, what stands out to you about that?
To experience massive immediate success, getting
to the absolute pinnacle of your field in your
first three years, only to brutally hit an unbreakable
ceiling every single time. It's devastating.
You are the absolute best of the new guys, but
fundamentally incapable of beating the old guard.
That kind of repetitive heartbreak has to leave
a permanent mark on the culture of an organization.
It certainly did. And it set the stage for a
tremendous hangover in the 1970s. I bet. Because
all of that generous spending by the Salomons,
the cars, the Florida vacations, those massive
deferred contracts, it all came due just as the
team's on -ice performance began to slip. The
bill comes due. By the late 1970s, the franchise
was on the brink of total financial collapse.
At one point, the financial situation was so
dire that the Salomons had to cut the team's
entire staff down to just three employees. Three
people running an NHL team. Yes. One of them
was Emil Francis, who was serving as team president,
general manager, and head coach simultaneously.
Talk about wearing many hats. Just running an
entire professional sports franchise by yourself.
He was basically doing everything. And Francis
had to go out and beg for a corporate bailout.
He goes to the St. Louis -based pet food giant,
Ralston Purina, and convinces them to buy the
team, the arena, and an $8 .8 million debt just
to save the franchise. Right. So Ralston buys
them in 1977. They rename the arena the Checker
Dome, and the chairman publicly states he only
bought the team out of a sense of civic responsibility.
Which is a very fragile foundation for running
a professional sports team. Very fragile. The
team gets back to being competitive on the ice,
making the playoffs in 19... which kicked off
what would become an incredible 25 -year postseason
streak. But off the ice, the corporate takeover
was a disaster. How bad was it? Ralston Purino
was bleeding an estimated $1 .8 million a year
on the team. By 1983, a new chairman, William
Steeritz, takes over the company. He doesn't
care about hockey. What did he care about? His
personal sporting interest is horse racing. He
looks at the balance sheet, sees the Blues as
a massive money pit, and puts them immediately
on the market here's where it gets really interesting
yeah because Nobody in St. Louis had the cash
to meet the asking price. Nobody local could
afford it. So in 1983, a group led by Bill Hunter
steps up. Hunter wants to buy the team and move
them to his hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Saskatoon. The fans are stunned. The players
are entirely distracted. During a game against
the Edmonton Oilers, brochures were actually
distributed in the arena titled Saskatchewan
in the NHL. Can you imagine? To be playing professional
sport, look up into the stands and... see marketing
materials for the city your team is about to
be relocated to, it is pure chaos. Absolute chaos.
Ralston Purina authorized the $12 million sale
to Hunter's Group and promptly fired 60 % of
their remaining employees. Wow. But then the
NHL Board of Governors stepped in. They voted
15 to 3 to reject the sale and transfer. They
cited that Saskatoon, a relatively small market,
could not support an NHL franchise. Wait, let
me push back on that for a second. Sure. Hockey
is practically a religion in Canada. Why would
the NHL turn down a rabid Canadian market just
to save a failing corporate setup in Missouri?
It's a great question, and it really comes down
to the business of the league at the time. The
NHL was trying to secure larger American television
footprints. trading a major U .S. media market
like St. Louis for a much smaller Canadian market
like Saskatoon, regardless of how passionate
the fans were, was viewed as a step backward
for the league's overall broadcast leverage.
The owners voted to protect the league's market
size over a quick cash out. That makes total
sense from a business perspective, but Ralston
Purina did not take that rejection well, did
they? They went completely nuclear. Nuclear.
This is a masterclass in corporate negligence
and leverage. Ralston files a $60 million federal
antitrust lawsuit against the NHL. Good grief.
Then they just wash their hands of the team.
They publicly announce when the 1983 NHL entry
draft happens. Ralston Purina doesn't even send
a representative. Yeah. They skipped the draft
entirely, forfeiting all their picks. A multi
-million dollar sports franchise. And the owners
just ghost the draft. Just didn't show up. It's
unimaginable in today's multi -billion dollar
sports landscape to just not show up to pick
your future players. The NHL then sues them back
for $78 million, accusing them of maliciously
collapsing the team. It's a total mess. And the
NHL Board of Governors officially terminated.
the team. They take control of the franchise.
The league president announces that if they can't
find a buyer by August 6th, they're going to
dissolve the franchise entirely and hold a dispersal
draft. Right, meaning all the St. Louis players
would just be auctioned off to other teams. The
Blues were days away from ceasing to exist. But
with 10 days to spare, a St. Louis businessman
named Harry Ornist buys the team at the 11th
hour. And this is where the resilience of the
franchise really begins to harden. Ornist saves
them, but he has to run the team on an extreme
shoestring budget. Extremely tight. During most
of his tenure, he only had 26 players under contract
in the entire organization. For context, most
NHL teams at the time had over 60 players under
contract to fill out their major and minor league
rosters. Yeah, that's a massive difference. And
he's asking players to defer their salaries just
to keep the lights on. Yet they stayed. According
to team captain Brian Sutter, the players wanted
to stay because St. Louis reminded them of the
rural Canadian towns where many of them grew
up. They fought for this city. And against all
odds, that scrappy, survivalist mentality kept
them highly competitive. Which transitions us
perfectly into the late 1980s and the 1990s.
This was a period of incredible consistency,
defined by the arrival of a true superstar. In
1988, they traded for Brett Hall. The Golden
Brett. The Golden Brett. A nod to his legendary
father, Bobby Hull, who was the Golden Jet. He
completely changed the dynamic of the team. He
was an absolute scoring sensation. In the 1990
to 1991 season, he netted 86 goals. 86. He was
awarded the Hart Memorial Trophy, proving he
was the most valuable player in the entire league.
Just to put that goal -scoring tear in perspective,
The source material notes that only Wayne Gretzky
ever found the net more than Hall during any
given three -year period in NHL history. That
is elite company. Hall was the centerpiece. But
the front office also brought in huge Hall of
Fame caliber talents like Adam Oates, Brendan
Shanahan, Al McInnes, and eventually Chris Pronger.
And that collection of talent fueled something
historic. They were just an absolute machine
in the regular season. Exactly. From 1980. all
the way to 2004, the St. Louis Blues made the
playoffs for 25 consecutive years. 25 years.
That is the third longest streak in North American
professional sports history. They even won the
President's Trophy in the 1999 -2000 season with
a franchise record 114 points, proving they were
the absolute best team in the league over the
course of the regular season. But there is always
a but with this team, isn't there? Making the
playoffs 25 years in a row is an incredible feat,
but it also means 25 years of final results.
Yes. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
you have a franchise that survived near extinction,
built a quarter century of playoff consistency,
boasted some of the greatest players to ever
lace up skates, and yet they couldn't win it
all. Not once. During that entire 25 -year streak,
they never once made it back to the Stanley Cup
final. They only even reached the conference
finals twice. The stigma of never being able
to take the next step became a heavy psychological
weight on the organization and the fans. That
is a very specific type of sports fandom to endure.
Year after year of hope, buying tickets, cheering
for absolute legends, dominating the regular
season, and then bracing for the inevitable spring
collapse. They were the perennial contenders
who always broke their fans' hearts. Fast forward
through the 2000s and 2010s, and you see more
ownership changes, rebuilds, glimmers of hope.
followed by crushing early round playoff exits.
It felt like a curse. It really did. Which brings
us to the 2018 -2019 season. The stage is perfectly
set for the most absurd script of all. Let's
set the scene for this because it is staggering.
It's January 1st, 2019. The St. Louis Blues have
a record of 15 -18 -4. They are in dead last
place in the entire National Hockey League. Dead
last. They had already fired their head coach,
Mike Yayo, in November, replacing him with an
interim coach named Craig Berube. The season
is universally considered a complete wash. The
situation looked totally hopeless. But then a
rookie goaltender named Jordan Binnington emerges
from the minor leagues. Right. The team completely
buys into Berube's hard -nosed demanding system.
They rattle off an 11 -game winning streak between
February and March. Incredible. They go from
worst in the league to clinching a playoff spot.
They're only the seventh team in NHL history
since the 1967 expansion to make the playoffs
after being in last place on New Year's Day.
And they didn't just make the playoffs to be
a feel -good story. They systematically exercised
52 years of demons. They really did. They battle
through the Western Conference, defeating the
San Jose Sharks in the conference finals. And
then on June 12, 2019, they find themselves in
Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final against the Boston
Bruins, the exact same franchise that swept them
in 1970 to start their legacy of heartbreak.
Full circle. And they win 4 -1. The poetic justice
of that victory is incredible. Ryan O 'Reilly
was awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy, the MVP of
the entire postseason. proving his value in the
most critical moments. So well -deserved. After
52 years, the oldest franchise to never win the
Cup finally gets to lift it. They were the last
of the surviving 1967 expansion teams to win
it all. It was so monumental that the state of
Missouri passed a law making the Blues the official
state hockey team. That is the ultimate payoff
for a fan base. And what strikes me about that
2019 run is the vibrant culture that fueled it.
The traditions of this team are so deeply woven
into the fabric of the city. Absolutely. The
fan culture is organic and fierce. For instance,
the live music is a huge part of the atmosphere.
The team's organist, Jeremy Boyer, plays a Glenn
Miller arrangement of W .C. Handy's classic song,
St. Louis Blues, before games and at the end
of periods. And the fans are so dialed in. When
the organist plays, when the Saints go marching
in after a goal, the whole arena replaces the
word Saints with Blues. I love that. Or how about
the towel guy, Ron Dorshall, sitting up in Section
314 since 1990. Every time they score, he rings
a bell, the crowd counts the goals out loud,
and he throws a towel into the stands. It's electric.
Or during the national anthem, when the singer
gets to the home of the brave, the entire arena
drowns him out by shouting, the home of the BLOEs.
And that 2019 run introduced two new musical
phenomena that became legendary in the city.
The first was Laura Branigan's 1982 pop hit,
Gloria. Oh, of course. A couple of players heard
it playing in a bar in Philadelphia in January
that year, right when they were at their lowest
point. They started playing in the locker room
after every home win, and it became the anthem
of their entire Stanley Cup run. And then there's
the beautiful mistake with John Denver's Country
Roads. In February of 2019, during a game where
they were blowing out the Nashville Predators,
the arena entertainment director played Country
Roads. But he miscalculated the timing. Play
resumed on the ice before the chorus was over,
so he had to cut the music abruptly. But the
fans didn't care at all. Not even a little. They
kept singing entirely a cappella so loudly that
the Fox Sports broadcast picked it up loud and
clear on television. It was pure magic. It became
a staple, played at the 15 -minute mark of the
third period at every home game since. It's a
testament to a fan base that never gave up, even
when the corporate entities running the team
actively tried to. And that identity is still
evolving today. Looking ahead to the 2025 to
2026 season, the franchise announced they're
returning to their original 1967 colors, that
classic vibrant blue and yellow. They're also
entering a new era of broadcasting, transitioning
to a radio and television simulcast that marks
the end of John Kelly's remarkable 20 -year tenure
as the TV voice of the blues. The organization
is constantly bridging its chaotic past with
its present. So what does this all mean? We've
covered mob -connected original owners trying
to dump real estate, billionaire pet food companies
skipping drafts, 86 goal seasons, a quarter century
of heartbreak, and last place miracles. What
is the takeaway for you listening to this right
now? The St. Louis Blues are the ultimate case
study in institutional resilience. Whether you
are running a business, leading a team, or just
navigating the severe setbacks in your own life,
the Blues prove a fundamental truth. You can
be designed to fail from the start. You can be
abandoned by your financial backers. You can
suffer decades of heartbreaking near misses that
make people doubt you will ever break through.
But if you cultivate a strong community, honor
your history, and capitalize on sudden momentum,
like an interim coach and a rookie goalie, You
can rewrite a 52 -year legacy of failure in a
matter of months. That is incredibly powerful.
You are never as far from the mountaintop as
you think you are. Precisely. And this raises
an important question, something to leave you
pondering long after we wrap up today. Okay.
If we look all the way back to the very beginning,
to that 1967 NHL expansion draft, the St. Louis
Blues were on the clock to make their first round
draft pick, their first major decision as a professional
sports franchise. And what did they do? What
did they do? They passed. They opted not to pick
anyone in the first round. So I leave you with
this thought. How does an organization that completely
skips its first ever draft pick survive to build
a legacy that commands the devotion of millions
and lasts over half a century? It defies all
logic, and yet that is the exact magic of sports.
It truly is. What an incredible journey. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive.
We loved putting this together just for you,
and we hope you walk away today with a new appreciation
for the beautiful, chaotic, and completely unpredictable
history of the St. Louis Blues. Until next time,
keep learning, keep questioning, and we'll catch
you on the next deep dive.