It has been a long time since the St. Louis Blues have hosted a Stanley Cup final game.
Game three in St. Louis did not go the way Blues fans would have liked, but Larry Keenan is still cheering for his former team which is down 2-1 in the finals against the favoured Boston Bruins with game four set for tonight in St. Louis.
After all, Keenan was on the ice with the last Blues team that played in the Stanley Cup final back in 1970.
That year Boston won the first three games and Keenan’s goal, his 7th of the playoffs, in game four gave the Blues a 3-2 lead.
However, the Bruins tied it up and won the game and the series on Bobby Orr’s iconic “flying through the air” goal.
The former Blues alum and longtime North Bay Trappers coach says he has great memories of St. Louis.
“My wife enjoyed St. Louis, my kids enjoyed it and my youngest son was born there. I think it’s a great city,” Keenan told Rogers radio.
Keenan admits his buddies have been giving him a hard time with the Blues meeting the Bruins again 49 years later.
However, despite being down, Keenan believes in this Blues team of 2019.
“The Blues have to come to play,” he said to Rogers’ Bob Coles.
“We were outmanned talent wise 49 years ago and I think this spring they have as good as a chance as Boston.”
But Keenan is not the only North Bay connection to the Blues. In fact, many forget that North Bay’s own Mike Yeo was the head coach of the Blues until he was dismissed in November of 2018 and replaced by Craig Berube.
The Blues continued to struggle at first under Berube’s guidance as they were last in the NHL standings in early January. However, the emergence of rookie goaltender Jordan Binnington helped stabilize a team weakness and was a key part of the Blues amazing and improbable turnaround.
As the saying goes, “Show me a good coach and I'll show you a good goalie. Show me a bad goalie and I'll show you an ex-coach.”
However, during that Blues run, Yeo was elected into the North Bay Sports Hall of Fame and was hired as an assistant coach by the Philadelphia Flyers.
See related: Yeo heading to North Bay Sports Hall of Fame
See related: Yeo joins Flyers coaching staff
But the Blues connection to North Bay does not stop with Yeo and Keenan. Another pair of locals wore the Blue note in the 1990’s.
Darren Turcotte, currently the head coach of the Lakers varsity women's hockey team, played on one of the most star-studded Blues teams of all time in 1997-98.
That team included the likes of Brett Hull, Pierre Turgeon, Chris Pronger, Al MacInnis, Grant Fuhr, Geoff Courtnall and Steve Duchesne.
That team swept the LA Kings in the opening round but lost in six games to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Detroit Red Wings in the conference semi-finals.
Former NHLer Bill Houlder also spent a season with the Blues. Like Turcotte, The North Bay Battalion assistant coach played on another talent-laden Blues squad during the lockout season of 1994-95 where he played with Brendan Shanahan, Brett Hull, Curtis Joseph, Glen Anderson and Esa Tikkanen.
However, that season Houlder’s Blues were knocked out in a hard-fought seven game series to an underdog Vancouver Canucks team in the opening round.
But the connections don't stop there. Forward Ken Richardson played his only 49 NHL games with the Blues in the late 1970's in 1974-75, 1977-78 and 1978-79.
Meantime defenceman Gordon Kannegiesser played 19 games on the original Blues expansion team of 1967-68 and also played four more contests with the Blues in 1971-72.
