Craig Berube likely won’t be the winner of the Jack Adams award for coach of the year in the National Hockey League, but the coaching job he has done this season might rank with the best of all time.
Berube, who took over the Blues from the fired Mike Yeo in November, will get some votes for the Adams trophy but the likely winner is Jon Cooper of the Tampa Bay Lightning, who enjoyed an historically successful regular season (62 wins, tied for the most ever).
And there’s the rub: Voting for the Adams trophy and other NHL awards are done at the end of the regular season — not the playoffs — so Berube’s job in taking the Blues all the way to the Stanley Cup final is merely grist for the mill.
Berube, Cooper and the Islanders’ Barry Trotz are Adams finalists and if the Blues go on to beat Boston to win the Stanley Cup, Berube will be more than pleased to let Cooper have the Adams as a consolation prize.
The Blues were horrible in the first two months of the season, and Yeo took the hit. Berube was hired in November and St. Louis continued to flounder, sitting dead last in the NHL on Jan. 3.
Enter goaltender Jordan Binnington. Called up to the Blues in mid-December, Binnington got his first start Jan. 7 and rattled off 13 wins in his next 15 games. Berube looked like a genius, but it was the play of Binnington that changed the mindset around the Blues locker room. Berube took down a bulletin-board posting of the NHL standings in the dressing room and strove to “get them to believe,” he told TSN. The Blues proceeded to post a 30-10-5 record down the stretch, then beat Winnipeg, Dallas and San Jose en route to the Stanley Cup final against Boston.
It will be St. Louis’s first Cup final appearance since 1970, when Boston beat them 4-0 on the famous Bobby Orr-flying-through-the-air goal in Game 4. In fact, the Blues played the Bruins twice earlier in the Cup finals and are 0-12 lifetime against the Bruins on hockey’s biggest stage.
Thanks to their record down the stretch, it’s not farfetched to say the Blues were the best team in the Western Conference this season, even though Calgary Flames had the most points. The same cannot be said of the Bruins, whose road to the Cup final was made easier when the East’s best team, Tampa Bay, unexpectedly went out in the first round.
The Berube-Binnington-worst-to-first story is just too good to end on a bad note. Kiss of death or not, it says here the Blues will beat Boston to win their first Stanley Cup.
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