There would be no repeat this year.

The defending champion St. Louis Blues were ousted in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs by a young Vancouver Canucks squad and for head coach Craig Berube, there were signs his team didn’t look like the one that was first in the Western Conference when the season went on pause in mid-March.

“I was concerned after the round robin because to be honest with you, we didn’t play very good hockey in the round robin,” Berube told TSN’s Ray Ferraro and Darren Dreger in this week’s edition of The Ray & Dregs Hockey Podcast. “We played spurts of good hockey but I didn’t see enough going into playing Vancouver, who’s a young, hungry team with some very good talented players on it.

“We tied it up 2-2 in that series, I felt pretty good about our team. Jake Allen played good in Games 3 and 4 and we get up 3-1 Game 5, just let it slip away. I think that was the difference obviously in Game 6, they had way more momentum than we had.”

Blues No. 1 goalie Jordan Binnington struggled in the NHL’s bubble in Edmonton. In five postseason starts, he recorded five losses, an .851 save percentage and 4.72 GAA. Despite backup Allen recording better numbers, Berube said it wasn’t a tough choice turning to Binnington, who backstopped the Blues to a Stanley Cup last season, in the critical Game 6.

“He’s always come through for us so for me it wasn’t a difficult decision to be honest with you, said Berube. “I expect a lot out of ‘Binner’. I trust him, he’s done it for us in the past, he’s done for us throughout this next year, he’s always come up big in big games. It’s a big game, I went with him. It didn’t work out.”

Prior to the restart of the season, several Blues players contracted COVID-19 with Berube admitting his players were struggling with lingering effects of the virus in the playoffs.

“There are some real good players for us who unfortunately got sick, it takes quite a toll on them,” said Berube. “Even at the playoffs tournament, they still weren’t feeling one hundred percent. There’s a lot of lasting effects that they had. But in saying that, you can’t really use excuses. We didn’t perform well enough as a team to move on. That’s the bottom line, it really is. We needed more players to play better and it just wasn’t there.”

The Blues head into the off-season with some lingering concerns. First is the health of star forward Vladimir Tarasenko, who left the playoffs to undergo a third shoulder surgery. He missed most of the 2019-20 season rehabbing from the last shoulder surgery on Oct. 29. He is expected to be re-evaluated in five months.

The second is the contract status of captain Alex Pietrangelo, who is an unrestricted free agent. Drafted fourth overall by the Blues at the 2008 NHL Draft, Pietrangelo has spent his entire NHL career in St. Louis and was a key cog in the franchise’s first-ever Stanley Cup championship in 2019.

Berube also offered his support to the eight teams remaining in the NHL’s bubbles in Toronto and Edmonton, who decided to call off games on Thursday and Friday to protest systemic racism. The move comes after the NBA called off their games on Wednesday afternoon with the WNBA doing the same and some MLB and MLS teams opting to do so as well.

“I fully support it,” said Berube. “I think the players are doing a great job plus the league in making a stand. You know, this stuff’s got to stop obviously and they’re doing the right thing.“