Ottawa Senators vs St. Louis Blues

Lore & Background

The Blues arrived in 1967 as one of the six franchises that doubled the NHL, bringing a distinctly American, working-class identity to a league that had been Canadian for nearly seven decades. Their early struggles—years without a playoff berth, the infamous 1969 Stanley Cup Final heartbreak—forged a fanbase that carried its team through droughts with a loyalty that felt almost religious. By the time the modern Senators took the ice in 1992, St. Louis was already a club with a mythology of near-misses and redemption.

Ottawa's second incarnation carried its own myth: a city that had lost its original dynasty in 1912 and waited eighty years for the name to return. When the two teams met in the interconference schedule, the contrast was stark—a small Canadian capital with a proud, almost aristocratic hockey history clashing with a midwestern American club that had weathered decades of expansion-era turbulence. The games were fewer, but each one carried the weight of those parallel stories.

The 2007 playoffs crystallized the matchup in the minds of Ottawa fans. A lower-seeded Senators team, playing with a ferocity that felt almost desperate, overcame a Blues squad that many expected to steamroll through the early rounds. The series became a touchstone for the modern franchise's identity: proof that Ottawa could win on the road, in a hostile building, against a team with more star power and deeper resources. For the Blues, it was a reminder that the playoffs erase conference lines and that no seed is safe.

In Their Own Story

The air in the Scottrade Center tasted of stale beer and cold concrete. It was a Tuesday in March, one of those interconference dates the schedule threw in like a reminder that the league is bigger than any one city. The Senators' bus had been on the road for nine hours, the players' shoulders still aching from the drive. A few thousand Ottawa flags dotted the upper deck, a small stubborn constellation in a sea of blue. The puck dropped, and for twenty minutes neither team blinked. Then a Senators forward, skating with the kind of anger that only a small-market player can sustain, buried a wrist shot from the blue line into the five-hole while the Blues' goaltender was still resetting his stance. The Ottawa flags erupted. For ninety seconds, the building belonged to the capital. Then the horn, and the bus back to Ottawa, and the memory filed away for the next time the bracket put them together in June.

Reader's Guide

The Ottawa–St. Louis matchup has no single origin incident the way Ottawa–Montreal or Ottawa–Toronto do. Its roots are structural: two clubs in different conferences, meeting only a handful of times per year, with their most consequential games reserved for the playoffs. The tension, when it flares, comes from the contrast in identity rather than a shared history of cheap shots and bad calls.

The Blues' 1967 expansion pedigree and their early-1970s near-misses give them a gravitas that Ottawa's 1992 arrival does not match in age, but the modern Senators carry the emotional weight of the original club's 1912 departure. When the two meet, it is a conversation between two cities that define themselves through hockey in ways that feel disproportionate to their population.

Statistically, the head-to-head is sparse by design. Interconference play limits regular-season meetings, and playoff encounters have been infrequent. The 2007 series, in which Ottawa overcame a higher-seeded Blues team, remains the defining chapter. It reinforced Ottawa's identity as a team that thrives in high-pressure, road-heavy playoff runs.

For the fanbase, these games are a reminder that the NHL is a national league, not a regional one. The rivalry is not about who sits next to you in the standings. It is about what happens when the bracket forces you to prove you belong in the same conversation as a team with a longer, more turbulent history.

Did You Know?

• The St. Louis Blues were one of six expansion franchises that doubled the NHL from six to twelve teams in the 1967–68 season.
• Because Ottawa is in the Eastern Conference and St. Louis in the Western, the two teams meet only during the interconference portion of the regular season, typically just two to four times a year.
• The modern Ottawa Senators are the second use of the franchise name; the original Ottawa Senators played in the NHL from 1899 to 1912, a span that predates the Blues' existence by more than fifty years.
• In the 2007 Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Senators defeated the Blues in a series that became a defining moment for the modern franchise's identity as a competitive playoff team.