The St. Louis Blues will open the 2026-27 season on the road, visiting the Dallas Stars on Friday, Oct. 2, and the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday, Oct. 6, before returning to Enterprise Center to host the San Jose Sharks in their home opener on Thursday, Oct. 8, at 7 p.m., the team announced Wednesday. The full 84-game schedule is out Thursday at noon Central.
There is a wrinkle in the slate, one The Hockey News flagged after the league’s announcement: St. Louis appears in three home openers this fall — Dallas’s, Chicago’s and its own. The first two are division rivals’ opening nights, which means the Blues spend the season’s first week as the visiting act for other buildings’ celebrations before getting one of their own. With the new 84-game format adding two divisional games to every schedule, the Central grind starts immediately rather than easing in.
Oct. 8 will be the home crowd’s first regular-season look at a reshaped roster. The club’s announcement pointed to its new additions by name: Mason McTavish, Connor McMichael, Brandon Carlo and Ross Johnston. McTavish and McMichael give the middle of the lineup scoring options it has needed, Carlo brings a veteran shutdown presence to the blue line, and two immediate division road games will show quickly how the new pieces hold up against the teams St. Louis has to climb past. Earning the home crowd’s first look only after a pair of Central road tests is, frankly, the right order of operations for a team built on work before applause.
On the fantasy side, the deployment questions — where McTavish centers, whether McMichael holds a top-six role — won’t resolve until camp, but both are mid-round targets whose value moves with usage in the new lineup, and McTavish in particular is worth watching as a two-way center still short of his scoring ceiling. Once Thursday’s full schedule lands, the season-opening road stretch is the first spot to check for early-week streaming density.
