It’s over folks. The St. Louis Blues are, in every possible way, in every single scenario, eliminated from postseason contention. And it happened a lot later than we would have thought six months ago.

To keep their already (very) slim hopes alive for the playoffs, they needed to beat Carolina on Friday and, if by chance they couldn’t do that, hope Vegas loses.

Neither happened. St. Louis lost 5-2, and Vegas won 7-2 over Minnesota.

Jordan Kyrou and Zack Bolduc scored for St. Louis and Jordan Binnington made 37 saves.

“Certainly I can’t fault the effort. Certainly the effort was here from our group tonight,” interim Blues coach Drew Bannister said. “We made three mistakes on the first three goals and they made us pay, and that’s what good hockey teams do. We certainly created enough offense to grab a lead or separate a little bit more but we failed to kind of cash in on some of the chances that we had.”

This St. Louis team, from the highs, and the lows, have showed a lot of grit and perseverance this season.

“Us guys in here, no matter what the odds are, kind of where we were at in the season, we never gave up and we won’t give up,” Robert Thomas said. “That’s what I’m taking away from this.”

Despite the loss on Friday, there were plenty of bright spots from the game, and accomplishments set.

Kyrou has consecutive 30-goal seasons for the first time in his career, just the fifth Blues player to do so since 2000, following Vladimir Tarasenko, Brad Boyes, Keith Tkachuk and the late Pavol Demitra.

Meanwhile, Thomas now has 60 assists. He is the first Blues player to have 60 or more assists in a season since 1993-94 when Craig Janney had 68.

“It’s nice. I would have rather been playing in the playoffs,” Thomas said. “You never know what’s going to happen here, but I think that’s my main priority.”

So while it’s sad to see them out of the playoff hunt, it’s nice to see they exceeded where we thought they’d be considering “Chief” Craig Berube got fired, many star players were traded in 2023, and there was seemingly no direction this year.

All we can do now is look towards 2024-25.

Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports (Photo Credit)