from Jeremy P. Rutherford of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
Beyond the numbers, what Brouwer brings to the Blues is a winner’s mentality. That’s not to put the fault of the team’s playoff flameouts on Oshie, but it has been apparent that the club has lacked a championship-pedigree player on its roster in recent postseasons.
“You hear it from a bunch of people when you win, but it’s something that you have to believe in everyday, knowing you’re going to win going into every game,” said Brouwer, who collected four goals and eight points in 19 playoff games during Chicago’s Stanley Cup run in 2010. “The best way I can describe it is, we were having a team dinner before the finals and we didn’t know if we were going to play Philadelphia or Montreal. But we had the mindset of ‘Who cares who we’re going to play? We know we’re going to win.’”
Philadelphia handled Montreal in the Eastern Conference finals, and Chicago won the Cup on Patrick Kane’s overtime goal in Game 6.
“Losing wasn’t even crossing our minds, it didn’t even creep in,” Brouwer said. “That ignorance that nobody can beat you if you don’t want them to, you learn how to do that pretty quick, and if you keep that mentality, it goes a lot further than some people might think.”
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