The St. Louis Blues have tons of people excited due to their flashy summer acquisitions. Lost in the shuffle is the work the scouts do through the years to make this team a constant threat.
The St. Louis Blues, like all teams, are in the constant struggle to build a championship team for the here and now, while walking the tightrope of keeping your team viable for the future. While the Blues have yet to win that championship, we can take no credit away from the guys that have built toward the future every single year.
One of the most difficult things in sports is to continually build a high-quality team when you are constantly drafting in the middle portions each year. That is exactly what the St. Louis Blues have been doing over the 2010’s and, with a few misses here or there, they have done a phenomenal job.
As fans, we get caught up in the media hype of today’s news cycle. We rage when Doug Armstrong does not match every trade made by a division rival. We call for his job almost every summer only to marvel at his ability to dump bad contracts and pick up really valuable players in the process.
That is the life of any general manager in any sport. One day you are the hero and a week later you are the villain, or vice versa.
However, the life of the scouting department is much quieter and often goes by without any accolades. Most of this is because, like the quarterback in football, the GM still gets the credit and the blame for good and bad drafts. We overlook the tireless work put in by dozens of people, behind the scenes, that leads to those quality players (or sometimes not) making it to the NHL.
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The Blues scouting staff has been doing just that for a long time and deserve some credit for their work. They have been part of selecting some very talented players over the years. Their only major flaws is that the team has been too good for them to be able to make higher picks.
Bill Armstrong, no relation to Doug, has been with the Blues since 2004. After a short stint as a minor league coach, Armstrong moved into scouting for the Blues. He worked his way up and became Director of Amateur Scouting in 2010, a position he has held ever since.
In that time, Bill Armstrong and his staff have drafted some very good names. David Perron, Jake Allen, TJ Oshie, Ben Bishop, Vladimir Tarasenko, Jaden Schwartz, Alex Pietrangelo, Erik Johnson, Colton Parayko, Jordan Kryou, Robert Thomas and Klim Kostin were all names picked under the current regime.
We can argue at length about their NHL success. Several have not lived up to the hype, such as Johnson, but all of them are still very productive NHL players. The ones yet to suit up for the Blues are all expected to be solid contributors in the next few years.
By all means, you cannot ignore the misses. The Blues selected Johnson over Jonathan Toews, which might have set the franchise back quite a few years. However, we do not know for certain the Blues would have surrounded Toews with the same talent the Chicago Blackhawks did, so you cannot guarantee the same success. Most of us would like to have taken that chance in hindsight, but such is life.
Other doubters will say that almost all of those names, save for Tarasenko and Schwartz, were never truly top-line players, even if they played there. That is very true, but that does not fall on the scouting department.
They can only suggest the best players available when the Blues have their turn to draft. The last two times the Blues have actually had a selection in the top-10 was 2006 and 2008, when they drafted Johnson and Pietrangelo.
Despite our misgivings about either of them, they are solid NHL players. Pietrangelo is a top-two defenseman on the vast majority of NHL teams. Johnson never evolved into someone deserving of a top selection overall, but he is still a top-six defender. Any other year, you just shrug and say it was a miss. It is only because a potential Hall of Fame player was there do you truly question that pick.
Other than those two picks, the Blues have been selecting picks anywhere from the teens to the late 20’s and even in the 30’s once or twice. It is extremely hard to find top line talent in those slots, but the Blues have still managed to do it.
Again, fans love to see the negativity, simply because we see players day in and out. However, to think that Tarasenko or Schwartz are not top line caliber players is foolishness. The entire league would like a re-do on that draft since the Blues nabbed them both in the same draft at picks 16 and 14 respectively.
The Blues also have gotten credit for their pipeline of players the past few years. They ranked as the eighth best system in the summer of 2017 and bumped up to fifth in 2018. That is a testament to the work these people put in.
These guys work all sorts of weird hours and schedules. You’ve got ex-NHL players like Keith Tkachuk or former GM’s like Larry Pleau. You’ve got the regular staffers like Tony Feltrin, Dan Ginnell, J Niemiec, Michel Picard, Timo Koskela and Jesse Wallin.
Jan Vopat has done a very good job after taking over for Jarmo Kekalainen as head of European Scouting. Even that part-timers like Jeff McKercher, Alexey Starovoytov, Stefan Elvenes, Ian MacLellan, Garrett Peters and Blair Nicholson are important cogs in the machine.
They all deserve a round of applause for the work they do in helping to assemble these Blues teams, even if their work is not recognized for years. Yes, you can make the case the players they have taken are all second liners at best and most probably better off as third liner players.
When you are selecting in the middle-to-late spots in the draft, however, that’s still solid. To help select guys coming through the ranks now, such as Thomas and Kyrou, that are sought after by dozens of teams in the market is also an example that they manage to get quality.
Past a certain point, it is up to the player to get things done. The scouting department deserves all the credit in the world for finding these jewels in the rough though.