BOSTON -- Brace yourself, Jason Botterill. Brace yourself, Sabres fans. This is going to sting.
The St. Louis Blues are Stanley Cup champions. And Ryan O'Reilly is the Conn Smythe Trophy winner.
The veteran center, exiled from Buffalo 11 months ago by a rookie general manager desperately reacting to a 62-point season, scored the game-winning goal Wednesday night as the Blues stunned the Boston Bruins, 4-1, at TD Garden in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final.
O'Reilly was named the most valuable player of the playoffs as St. Louis won the first championship in its 52-year history. It was a remarkable capper to the franchise's historic season that saw it rally from last place in the NHL's overall standing on Jan. 3 to the top of the sport in just over five months.
And in Game 7, the Blues mostly have two players to thank.
Jordan Binnington made 32 saves and became the first rookie goalie in NHL history to win 16 games in a playoff season. He was riding a shutout until Boston's Matt Grzelcyk scored with 2:10 to play.
Meanwhile, O'Reilly became the first player to score in four straight games of the final since Wayne Gretzky did it for Edmonton in 1985, and the first player with a six-game point streak in the final since Mark Messier of the New York Rangers in 1994.
O'Reilly led all players in the series with five goals and eight points, and his 22 points in the playoffs set a St. Louis franchise record.
Binnington held St. Louis in the first period as the Bruins buzzed the Blues zone. The Blues, in fact, went more than 15 minutes without a shot on goal and only had one as the clock clicked inside four minutes to go in the scoreless opening frame.
O'Reilly and winger Sammy Blais finally got a forecheck going in the Boston zone and the puck went to veteran Jay Bouwmeester at the left point. His low slapshot was tipped by O'Reilly, who was breezing through the slot, and beat Tuukka Rask between the legs to open the scoring.
The Blues made it 2-0 with just 7.9 seconds left in the first period as Alex Pietrangelo took a neat blind backhand pass from Jaden Schwartz and beat Rask with a backhander from in tight.
From there, it was up to Binnington to keep the Bruins at bay. The yellow rally towel-waving Bruins fans did all they could to will their team to a comeback but it didn't happen. Brayden Schenn's goal with 8:35 left off a Vladimir Tarasenko feed came a couple of minutes after Binnington stoned Boston's Joakim Nordstrom to give the Blues breathing room. Zach Sanford, a Massachusetts native who grew up a Bruins fan, closed the scoring with 4:38 left.
When the final buzzer ended, the Blues mobbed Binnington at the goal. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman handed the Cup to Pietrangelo and the veteran defenseman held it aloft.
Game 7 was the 108th of the season for O'Reilly, tying him with nine other players for the most in NHL history when you combine the regular season and postseason.
“It’s definitely the most hockey I’ve ever played in a year but it’s also the most exciting hockey I’ve ever played too,” O'Reilly said on the eve of Game 7. “When you’re winning and having success and opportunities like this, it’s easy coming to the rink and practicing and getting on the ice. It’s exciting.”
"He’s our most consistent player from start to finish,” added Schenn. “Even when the team was playing terrible at the start, he was still a point a game. He was leading us right from the beginning, and he’s been doing it all playoffs.”
O'Reilly's heroics helped end a drought that stretched to the birth of the Blues in 1967. It leaves the Sabres and Vancouver Canucks -- both born in the 1970-71 season -- as the teams with the longest Cup droughts among franchises that have never won one. The Toronto Maple Leafs (1967) have had the longest wait among teams that have it at least once.
The Blues have an often storied and sometimes bizarre history. When they were born into the new West Division, they made trips to the Cup final in their first three seasons -- and got swept all three times. They never got back until this year, even though they had a long history of playoff appearances capped by 25 straight trips from 1980-2004.
So many big names in hockey have worn the Blue Note. Hall of Fame goalie Glenn Hall won a Conn Smythe as a losing player for the Blues in 1969. Red Berenson scored six goals in a 1968 game at Philadelphia, still one of just two NHL players to accomplish that in the NHL's post-1967 expansion era.
The 70s were the era of the Plager brothers, late captain Barclay Plager and beloved alum Bob Plager, who is the face of living alums who waited decades for this moment.
Center Garry Unger was an ironman, playing every game for eight straight seasons from 1971-79 and putting up at least 30 goals in all of them. But in the 80s, the team nearly moved to Saskatoon before multiple owners helped re-establish itself in Missouri.
There are statues of Bernie Federko, Al MacInnis and Brett Hull outside Enterprise Center in St. Louis. Before he won a Stanley Cup in Calgary and became a legend in Toronto, Doug Gilmour was a 40-goal/100-point man in St. Louis.
Wayne Gretzky played 18 games there at the end of the 1995-96 season, collecting 21 points. But he was off to New York the following season and the most significant moment of his brief run with the Blues was actually the center ice turnover that led to Steve Yzerman's double-overtime goal to beat the Blues in double overtime of Game 7 in the second round.
All great players. None of them became champions.
Story topics: Boston Bruins / Ryan O'Reilly / St. Louis Blues / Stanley Cup final
