Craig Berube and the St. Louis Blues Fell Victim to a Provable Point: Winning Again Is Even Harder
Craig Berube, fired by the Blues this week, found out how easily a drought-ending title can turn into a historical one-off.
In the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world of pro sports, former St. Louis Blues coach Craig Berube found out that his team’s magical 2019 Stanley Cup run could only buy him so much job security. With St. Louis sitting a point out of the Western Conference’s final wild card spot, and clinging to an 18% chance to make the playoffs, Blues management made the call to dismiss Berube earlier this week and move forward with interim bench boss Drew Bannister.
On the one hand, it’s not hard to see why Berube had to go. The team went 50-60 under his direction in the past two seasons, and was trending the wrong way. (Tuesday’s loss to the Detroit Red Wings — Berube’s final game at the helm — was the team’s fourth in a row and seventh in 10 games.) Berube had been in St. Louis for parts of six seasons, an eternity by NHL coaching standards. A new voice may help the team maximize its potential over the rest of the season.
But keeping your job as a hockey coach is all about performance relative to expectations. And what should the expectations have been for St. Louis, anyway, in the wake of its lone championship, the first in more than a half-century of play?
Capping off an incredible second-half surge from last place on Jan. 1 to a Stanley Cup by June, the 2018-19 Blues broke a 51-year title drought for the franchise, dating back to the NHL’s 1967-68 expansion season that ended the long-running Original Six era. That was the longest of three different 50+ year droughts that were snapped in the 2019 season across the five major North American pro sports leagues, joining the Kansas City Chiefs (50 years) and Washington Nationals (50 years).
Throw in the Toronto Raptors and Washington Mystics on the hardwood — each of whom snapped 20+ year droughts dating back to their respective foundings — and 2019 featured five pro champions that ended an average winless streak of 39.0 years, the highest for any year since the WNBA started in 1997. (Not even the 108-year drought snapped by the Cubs — themselves a surprising championship one-off in retrospect — could elevate 2016 over 2019 in this regard.) And in that season of drought-ending titles, the Blues reigned above them all:
When the honeymoon ends after that long-awaited championship, however, you have to go try and do it again. And that might be harder for teams coming off lengthy dry spells.
Yes, the Chiefs have won again. But of the 43 teams in our sample that snapped a drought of 20+ years, only 16 in total (or 37%) won another title in the subsequent years, and two of those — the 1999 Rams and 2002 Buccaneers — tacked on additional droughts of around 20 years apiece before they got back to the mountaintop. Compare that with the win rate for teams that didn’t snap a drought of 20+ years for their titles (51 of 90 won again, or 57%), and it’s clear that the ecstasy of a drought-breaking championship can easily turn into just a one-off blip in the team’s record books.
The Blues did themselves no favors in the years after that 2019 crown. They issued long-term contracts to core players from the playoff run (Jordan Binnington, Brayden Schenn, Colton Parayko) who haven’t always played well in the years since, and swung deals for big names (Torey Krug, Pavel Buchnevich, Justin Faulk, Kevin Hayes) who aren’t delivering star performances. Even the homegrown talents (young forwards Jordan Kyrou and Robert Thomas) who helped power St. Louis’ resurgent 2021-22 campaign, in which the team finished fourth in the West, have been uneven in the seasons since. With an underachieving roster weighed down by bad contracts and a rapidly dwindling playoff probability, firing Berube was the last-ditch option for longtime GM Doug Armstrong to salvage what’s left of this season, the remnants of the Cup-winning squad and maybe even his own job.
But the deck may have been stacked from the beginning against Berube and the Blues making the return trip to a title. In an era of increasing championship parity across all the major sports, championship droughts might be getting easier to end — but it may also be harder to turn a one-off into a dynasty, or to keep the next drought from taking form. Fewer than five years ago, Berube was on the good side of that phenomenon; this week, he discovered there was a bad side, too.
Filed under: NHL
Original story: Craig Berube and the St. Louis Blues Fell Victim to a Provable Point: Winning Again Is Even Harder