(Ed. Note: As the Stanley Cup Playoffs continue, we're bound to lose some friends along the journey. We've asked for these losers, gone but not forgotten, to be eulogized by the people who knew the teams best: The bloggers and fans who hated them the most. Here are the Chicago Blackhawks bloggers of The Committed Indian, fondly recalling the 2015-16 St. Louis Blues.)



By The Committed Indian (@RealFansProgram)

“Slayed the dragon!”

That’s a phrase we’ve gotten used to around these parts. Upon this day when we come to mourn/kick dirt/wildly celebrate yet another Blues playoff exit before anything a banner would be raised for, It’s time to consider that. We heard it five years ago, when another continually good-but-not-good-enough team hell-bent on measuring its manhood every shift beat a deeply flawed Hawks team, took the most amount of time to do it, and celebrated as if it was discovered drinking beer gives you superpowers. A team with Cup aspirations screaming out its lungs needing every bounce and break to beat a third-placed team.

It was Vancouver then. It’s St. Louis now. That’s some company you keep, Blues.

The Blues told us that triumph in the 1st round signaled that everything was different. This win proved that they’d learned their lesson. No longer was this a disgusting organization run by calculating, ham-handed, born-on-third executives with a section of their fandom doing their best to prove that evolution does not actually exist and become the scorn of the rest of the hockey world.

Oh wait, we’re supposed to be talking about the Blues and not the Hawks.

Sorry, back to that.

Much like the Canucks in 2011, all of it was folly. The lessons weren’t learned. The Blues didn’t change anything. They took seven games to beat a team that didn’t have a blue line. Then they took seven games to beat a team that didn’t have a goalie. Then they ran into a team that had a passable version of both and were pretty much DJ Jazzy Jeff’d out of the Bel Air mansion of the Western Conference playoffs. Hitch still played goalie roulette. He didn’t play Tarasenko as much as Paul Stastny and Troy Brouwer. They counted on Brouwer and Backes for scoring and ended up with a handful of themselves. Jabe O’Meester turned odd colors in the sun on the blue line, and yet was still counted on to match up with Joe Pavelski.

Around 754 goals later, they may want to look back on that.

View photos SAN JOSE, CA - MAY 25: Roman Polak #46 of the San Jose Sharks receives a hug from Vladimir Tarasenko #91 of the St Louis Blues in game six of the Western Conference Finals during the 2016 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs at the SAP Center at San Jose on May 25, 2016 in San Jose, California. (Photo by Don Smith/NHLI via Getty Images) More

And in a certain respect, the Blues couldn’t help but better serve their entitled, conspiratorial northern rivals even in pyrrhic first-round victory. In the near term, the Blues did many Hawks fans a favor by euthanizing an interminable season like so many of David Backes’ dogs, one marred by one tone deaf scandal after another.

After over eight months of screaming belligerence (and much worse) from the very vocal majority of its myopic fanbase, it was the only fate the Blackhawks ever deserved, and the Blues are now merely incidental to it.

Now a very flawed, exhausted, Trevor Van Riemsdyk-dependent team was put out of its misery, and the Blues are a mere footnote in the historical narrative of this playoff year as they always are. It’s never about you, St. Louis. It never will be.

And in the long term, the Blues advanced just far enough for the completely static Doug Armstrong to learn the wrong lessons from his aging, unidirectional core and bring the whole gang back next year another year older. But at least Doug doesn’t “circumvent the rules” and use the LTIR provision in the CBA to his advantage. He’d rather totally not blame injuries by kind of sort of blaming injuries while not admitting to himself and the public that the Blues are a capped out budget team that the locals barely bother to gas up the ‘87 S10 for. And they don’t turn out more than likely because their disability settlement from the local Dirt Cheap liquor store they used to work at and “accidentally” fell off a ladder from doesn’t quite cover the cost.