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Jordan Binnington’s incredible, season-saving run for Blues

Toronto Maple Leafs v St Louis Blues

ST. LOUIS, MO - FEBRUARY 19: Jordan Binnington #50 of the St. Louis Blues celebrates after the St. Louis Blues beat the Toronto Maple Leafs in overtime at the Enterprise Center on February 19, 2019 in St. Louis, Missouri. (Photo by Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images)

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The St. Louis Blues are the hottest team in hockey and in a little less than a month-and-a-half have gone from being one of the worst, most disappointing teams in the league, to what now looks to be a sure-fire playoff team with less than a quarter of the season to go.

It is not hard to see what the turning point has been for them, and it happened on Jan. 7 when they gave Jordan Binnington, a 25-year-old goalie that had appeared in just three NHL games in his career to that point, all of them in mop-up duty, his very first start.

He stopped all 25 shots he faced that night in a 3-0 win over the Philadelphia Flyers, and he has simply not stopped winning since.

The early numbers so far are more than impressive


  • In his 20 appearances this season he has recorded a 15-2-1 record for the Blues.
  • He has a .936 save percentage that is tops among goalies that have appeared in at least 20 games. Tampa Bay’s Andre Vasilevskiy is second at .930.
  • Along with that, he has a .948 save percentage at even-strength, that is also far and away the best mark in the league. New York Islanders goalie Thomas Greiss is second at .938.

When the Blues lost Carter Hutton in free agency this past summer to the Buffalo Sabres, it left their net in the hands of Jake Allen and Chad Johnson to start the season. That experience did not go well for either one of them individually, or for the Blues as a team. Through Jan 6, one day before Binnington’s first career start, the two Blues’ goalies had combined for an .891 save percentage, a performance that was, at the time, the third-worst in the league ahead of only the Philadelphia Flyers and Florida Panthers.

The Blues had their share of problems early in the season, but none of them were bigger than the black hole that was their goaltending situation. Neither Allen or Johnson were able to do anything to secure the position, and their performance was helping to sabotage a team that probably should have been at least a little bit better than their overall record showed.

Then Binnington showed up and everything for the Blues has been different ever since.

After being selected in the third-round of the 2011 draft by the Blues, Binnington spent the first seven years of his pro career in the American Hockey League and really started to see his performance improve over the past three. Still, he never really got his chance until this season and so far it has been a somewhat historic run that is kind of reminiscent of the improbable starts that Patrick Lalime and Andrew Hammond had to their careers when they came out of nowhere to lift their teams in their debut seasons.

Going as far back as the 1987 season, Binnington is one of just seven goalies to win at least 15 of their first 21 appearances in the NHL, joining a list that includes Brent Johnson, Hammond, Matt Murray, Semyon Varlamov, Lalime, and Frederik Andersen.

At some point Binnington’s individual performance is going to regress. It did for all of the goalies just mentioned, and there is no way he is going to maintain a .936 overall save percentage and a .948 even-strength save percentage. Lets be realistic here, it is a hot start to a career that could still go in any direction. Nobody, not even the Blues and Binnington himself, knows what that direction will ultimately be because projecting goalie performance is an almost impossible task, even for the people that are paid big money to have to figure it out. But this hot streak is still happening, and it came at just the right time for a Blues team that spent its offseason spending big money in an effort to get back into the playoffs and was dangerously close to having it all go to waste because nobody could stop the puck for them.

They found somebody to do that, and the season is headed right where they hoped it would be when it began.

Adam Gretz is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @AGretz.