2pm CST today marked the passing of the NHL trade deadline. Unless you’re Vegas blatantly circumventing the salary cap using LTIR players, the roster you have today is what you’re rolling with until a new champion of Lord Stanley is crowned.
What it also marked though, is that it may be time for Blues owner Tom Stillman to make a tough decision regarding Doug Armstrong. Not because we’re the worst team in the league, not because Doug can’t build an elite team (he’s done both), but because he is committed to not committing to either.
The last 3-4 seasons the elite core group that brought us our first Stanley Cup slowly drifted away, until the roster was but a shell of that team. Now, the last two seasons have really shown who the Blues are. Which is a middle of the pack at best team, with a GM unwilling to commit to one direction or the other. Either load up and go for it, or embrace the suck.
Last trade deadline and this past offseason Doug tried “re-tooling” by adding a few guys like Kevin Hayes (23 points in 63 games), Jakub Vrana (sent down to junior) and Kasperi Kapanen (16 points in 55 games played). And unfortunately for Blues fans all this attempt by Doug got us being a far cry from making playoffs, but also not in a position to get a high end draft pick. A Hail Mary by Doug, similar to Chad from Sigma Alpha sending a “you up” text to his group project partner from his Economy class he never goes to.
Neither work.
The Blues had a chance this trade deadline to finally quit avoiding the inevitable, and that is that this team is heading for a rebuild. A rebuild that should have started last trade deadline and continued this year so that we at least could watch our future stars come up and play, but instead we just got teased for about a month after firing Berube into thinking this team was anywhere close to being good enough to make a run.
Will it suck to watch a rebuild, which means we likely all but tank the rest of this season?
Yes, but at least we would have a clear direction. And it would at least be entertaining to see guys like Jimmy Snuggerud, Dalibor Dvorsky, Zach Bolduc, etc get more NHL ice time and develop.
Instead we’re watching Kevin Hayes get a similar salary as Ryan O’Reilly (32 more points than Hayes this season), Binnington is getting clobbered in net thanks to a D-core who beside Parayko should be making 2-3 million dollars less a season each, and Robert Thomas put up a historically good season.
All to miss the playoffs by like 10 points, draft like 15th overall, while Chicago gets another lottery pick to play with Bedard. Give it two year and Chicago is going to be spanking us on national television again just like the Kane and Toews days.
Meanwhile, Vegas, a team that started in 2017, is set to make a run to have more cups in 7 years than the Blues do in almost 70.
The Morning Skate 