Team: St Louis Blues
Team Building Status: Declining
The St Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup in 2019 after a mid season coaching change that saw Craig Berube take over at head coach. Five years later, the Blues are in decline and another mid-season coaching change saw Berube ousted from St Louis as the Blues are in danger of missing the postseason for the second straight season.
Roster Ruminations
NHL Roster
The Blues downhill slide isn’t expected to change course based on next year’s model projections. They are projected to have very poor possession metrics, propped up a bit by strong goaltending and finishing. It’s an extension of their 2023-2024 performance, which has seen similarly poor possession metrics at 5v5.
Salary Cap Management
Where things really get hairy is on the Blues’ cap sheet. They have only about 15% of next season’s cap space available to try to improve their roster. Worse might be their medium term outlook, where they have over 50% of their cap committed 3 seasons out. Aside from Jordan Kyrou and Robert Thomas, who are signed long term through their prime, the Blues’ other medium to long term commitments are for older players.
Future Assets
The Blues future outlook isn’t in bad shape but it’s not an area of strength either. Hockey Prospecting ranks the Blues 17th in the NHL for their prospect pool. It includes some star potential, including 2023 10th overall pick Dalibor Dvorsky. They also have a slightly above baseline draft pick success probability over the next three drafts.
What’s Next?
Looking at the Blues roster in 4 year age cohorts gives us a more complete picture of their over-reliance on an aging group:
| Centers | Wingers | Defensemen | Goalies |
| Brayden Schenn | Brandon Saad | Nick Leddy | Jordan Binnington |
| Kevin Hayes | Oskar Sundqvist | Torey Krug | |
| Nathan Walker | Colton Parayko | ||
| Justin Faulk | |||
| Marco Scandella |
| Centers | Wingers | Defensemen | Goalies |
| Pavel Buchnevich | |||
| Kasperi Kapanen | |||
| Sammy Blais |
| Centers | Wingers | Defensemen | Goalies |
| Robert Thomas | Jordan Kyrou | Tyler Tucker | |
| Nikita Alexandrov | Jake Neighbours | Scott Perunovich | |
| Alexey Toropchenko |
Much of the roster has turned over since the Blues Stanley Cup Championship in 2019, yet they are still quite reliant on the cohort that drove the roster to that championship run. Brayden Schenn and Colton Parayko remain from the cup winning roster, while the Blues have continued to replace departing players with more in the same cohort. The result is a large contingent of players in their 30s that are all starting to decline together. The problem isn’t that none of these players can be useful at this stage of their careers, it’s that having too many players aging together creates too large a drain on the collective performance.
The Blues roster is not all doom and gloom though. Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou provided the youthful exuberance for the Blues’ cup run and they’re now full fledged stars early in their prime. They are at the front edge of a cohort just starting to reach it’s prime and it’s time for the Blues to fully transition the leading roles on the NHL roster to this group. It probably should have happened already but the Thomas/Kyrou cohort is a bit thin to take full charge of the roster, particularly on defense. Adding to this group should be a priority if the Blues intend to return to contention in the short term.
Whether they intended it or not, the Blues skipped over their current late prime cohort, which fits well with regenerative cohort teambuilding. It’s allowed them to put the Thomas/Kyrou cohort together to transition the roster to. It also means there are a couple of players between their two main NHL cohorts that may be valuable trade chips, including Pavel Buchnevich. Buchnevich was rumored to be on the block through much of the 2023-2024 campaign and moving him now would make plenty of sense for the Blues. He’s in his late prime and can still fill a significant role for a contender so he could bring in a significant trade return.
The Blues also recognized they needed to make some changes and get younger over the past couple of seasons. We saw some big moves from them at the 2022 trade deadline, one of which sent Ryan O’Reilly to Toronto. The upshot from those deals is that they are in a decent spot to start building a cohort to eventually take over from the Thomas/Kyrou group. If they skip over a cohort again, it’s the next four drafts where their focus should be to build that future cohort.
If the Blues move on from their veteran cohort and fully transition to the Thomas/Kyrou cohort this summer, they may be able to re-boot fairly expediently. If they can convince themselves to make a move like trading Buchnevich, they could really boost that effort. And if they use their prospects and veterans as their trade chips, they can start building a future cohort that can keep them competitive for the long term.
