St. Louis Blues: There Weren’t Smart Deals To Be Made
By Todd Panula
Set your Twitters to rant and ready the comment section. You’re about to read an opinion that doesn’t mesh with the masses. The St. Louis Blues absolutely made the right call to let the trade deadline just slide by.
While there are several people out there who were not affected one way or the other, when the deadline passed with no movement by the ‘Note, it was as if a thousand voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, to borrow a line from Star Wars.
The Blues were apparently interested in a few different names. However, as Doug Armstrong has told several media outlets, including Andy Strickland on Fox Sports Midwest, the team set a value to all the players they were interested in and all the teams wanted too much.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s smart business. This isn’t baseball. The Blues aren’t the New York Yankees. You don’t just throw money at an issue for the sake of it. The Blues attempted that when Bill Laurie was the owner and nothing more came from it than any other Blues teams.
Blues fans constantly lose their minds over this issue though, especially of late with the advent of social media.
Any adventure into facebook or twitter and one is swarmed with an endless barrage of vitriol and hate, strong enough to fuel the most powerful Sith in the galaxy (sorry, still on that Star Wars kick).
Over and over you see phrases to the extent of “The entire central division has improved themselves and the Blues did nothing,” or “Chicago finds ways to bring in good players and the Blues management sits on their butts.” Those are just generalizations and most usually have much more colorful language.
The bottom line is painful, but the Blues just did not have the flexibility to make a move. They were unwilling, wisely so, to give up young pieces like Robby Fabbri or Colton Parayko and, outside of Jordan Schmaltz, don’t have the prospects other teams were in search of in exchange for what the Blues wanted.
Combine that with the fact that the Blues have next to no wiggle room in the salary cap and there just weren’t deals to be made. Again, cue the people who yell that the ‘Hawks find ways to get around their salary issues. That’s true to a point. However, they have Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane and Marian Hossa and to fall back on every year. That’s a pretty good core to fall back on when you’re constantly bringing in rookies or having to replace 1/3 of your team because you overspent right at the deadline and have to jettison contracts.
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Look at the players the Blackhawks have had to part with in recent years. They’ve lost Andrew Ladd (recently returned), Patrick Sharp and Dustin Byfuglien just to name a few. Until Crawford settled in, they switched goaltenders a few times as well.
That’s a hell of a lot of work to do to replace those caliber of players on a semi-yearly basis. They’ve had a lot of health as well, which helps out with the salary cap in the long run. It’s a complicated system, but basically the more you keep players on LTIR (long-term injured reserve), the less wiggle room you have to add players.
To put it in it’s simplest terms, (at least as far as I understand it) you used LTIR to gain the ability to bring up players from the minors but the original contract still counted against the cap. Some will say it’s a flawed system and that argument has merit, but it was agreed on in the CBA and also in place so teams don’t try to place a mistake contract on IR just to get it off the books.
Every team goes through injury, but the Blackhawks have not dealt with what the Blues have this season and very few teams have. According to Jeremy Rutherford, in an interview on 101 ESPN, of the teams that have suffered the most games lost to injury, only the Blues and the Colorado Avalanche have the ability to make the playoffs and the Blues are still in contention for the division and top spot in the West.
If you look at the deals made, outside of Ladd, who would have honestly made the Blues better? Who would have even made them as good as the unstoppable force that all the Chicken Littles want to believe the Blackhawks are?
The answer is no, not if this team could ever get healthy. Let’s look at the forwards that made a move, given that the Blues almost certainly did not need any more defensemen unless Carl Gunnarsson got dealt.
Lee Stempniak only has 16 goals and is projected to get 21. Brandon Pirri only has 11 goals. Mikkel Boedeker has 13 goals. Kris Versteeg has 11. Eric Staal has 10. Jiri Hudler has 10.
The deals that supposedly made the Chicago Blackhawks one step below the almighty were Tomas Fleischmann, who has 10, and Dale Weise, who has 13. Weise had never even scored in double-digits until the last two seasons with the Montreal Canadiens.
The unbelievable deals that were made earlier in the winter? Ryan Johansen has 4 goals for Nashville. Vincent Lecavalier has 5 goals for the LA Kings. The name that popped up incessantly was Jonathan Drouin.
The man has six NHL goals to his name, has proven himself to be a malcontent, has a bad attitude and is trying to force a trade and the most he’s scored was 29 in junior where stats can’t always be believed. Not someone I want on my team.
None of those names mentioned really set the world on fire on give anyone a tingly feeling in their special places. They’re serviceable players. The Blues have those in abundance.
You don’t just go out and get players like Steven Stamkos for nothing. This is the real world, not a video game. Fans seem to think that trades like the ones that brought Brett Hull or Wayne Gretzky or Lou Brock are commonplace. You have to give up something to get something and nothing available was worth what the Blues would have needed to send away.
People are too shortsighted and want everything. People want the team to give a raise to Jaden Schwartz, resign Kevin Shattenkirk, sign the top free agents every summer and make a blockbuster deal every deadline. That’s just not possible.
Sure, the Blackhawks made deals but they were going to be favorites even if they didn’t. All that maneuvering hasn’t set them apart from the rest of the division or conference as well. Blues fans, especially the older ones, should remember how much so many new faces can disrupt a team as well. During the Ron Caron years, he constantly made deals at the deadline just to make them and it ruined the chemistry of some really talented teams.
In the end, this team has to do what it always needed to do. They need to find it within themselves to get it done. Just look at what this team has accomplished. As of writing this article, they have the third best record in the conference and a chance to tie the Blackhawks and Dallas Stars in the standings.
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All of that has been done with a make-shift, piecemeal, battlefield triage lineup. If the Blues could ever get healthy, just image what they could be capable of. Players need to produce. Vladimir Tarasenko and Schwartz need to score more and players like David Backes, Alexander Steen, Patrik Berglund and Troy Brouwer all need to do more than they are. They need the young stars like Fabbri and Parayko to keep up their pace and maybe step it up.
Those are big ifs, no doubt, but so is any deal. Sometimes players don’t mesh well with new squads and the deal was for naught. The Blues just need to get healthy. Nobody on the block was going to make or break this team, but getting their team back will. They’ve proven they can stay near the top of the league with 2/3 of a roster. Maybe there is even more to do when they get all the guys together.