BREAKING David Backes Signs With Blues Announces Retirement.

My stretch in Boston is something I am so grateful for. It was an amazing group of men that I was able to play with and grow alongside of. Arriving there and being a complementary piece to the great core that had been there since they won the Stanley Cup in 2011 was an incredible learning experience for me. I learned about leading from the rear and was able to pour into teammates in ways I had never been able to do before.

Our remarkable march to the Stanley Cup Final in 2019 was filled with some of the highest highs and lowest lows I have experienced in the game, but I am appreciative of all of them. I never thought I would so intimately live the words I said when leaving St Louis: "If the team I was playing on wasn't going to win the Stanley Cup, I hoped it would be the Blues."

I found in the latter parts of my time in Boston that you can take something you would never ask for - like being a healthy scratch - and turn it into something good. It was a humbling lesson learned through sport that will permeate through life.