Jordan Binnington enters the final season of his contract with the Blues carrying two very different truths.
There’s the version of him St. Louis remembers best: the goalie who came up from the minors in 2018-19 and caught fire at exactly the right time, ripping off a 24-5-1 run with a .927 save percentage from early January through the end of the regular season.
That surge helped drag the Blues out of the basement and all the way to the Stanley Cup, with Binnington in the middle of it from start to finish. He faded some in the playoffs, but the Blues got the one number that mattered most: 16 wins.
Then there’s the version that showed up in 2025-26.
No player on the Blues may have affected the season more, and not in a good way. Binnington played 41 games, starting 39, and put up career-worst numbers across the board: a 3.33 goals-against average and an .873 save percentage.
Money Puck had his minus-22.4 goals saved above expected as the worst mark in the NHL, even when compared against goalies with any workload. The only netminder remotely in that neighborhood was Kevin Lankinen, whose Vancouver Canucks finished with the league’s worst record and who posted a minus-19.3 GSAx.
That kind of dip mattered. If Joel Hofer hadn’t steadied himself when he did, the Blues might have been looking at a lottery position instead of missing the playoffs by four points.
Binnington’s recent résumé still carries weight, though. He was Canada’s starter at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, and while the Canadians fell short in the gold medal game, he was strong throughout the tournament. That body of work is part of why last season can be viewed as an outlier rather than a full-on collapse.
Even so, the direction in St. Louis seems clear.
Hofer, now 26, looks ready to handle the bulk of the work next season, and the net should belong to him. That leaves Binnington, 33, in a backup or 1B role for now.
The Blues will need him to be better than he was last season, but the expectation is that he can still be a useful NHL backup. The bigger question is whether that’s a role he wants. Binnington has never looked like a goalie content to fade quietly into the background, and there are teams around the league in win-now mode that could use a proven starter.
Unless he lands an extension in St. Louis, the trade chatter is going to follow him all season, especially if the Blues stumble again.
For now, they need him to be dependable behind Hofer. Longer term, this could easily be his last year in St.
Louis.
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