St. Louis Blues: 5 Reasons Trading For A Goaltender Is The Worst Idea
The St. Louis Blues have a long standing quest for the next guy in between the pipes. Several names pop up here and there, but the team never seems to find that one. Looking right now is a bad idea though.
The St. Louis Blues seem perpetually jinxed when it comes to the goaltending position. When they have the guy they want, the team does not seem to be right or injuries tend to pop up at the worst time. Or, you get the right team and just need that one piece and the goalie himself picks the worst time to tank.
The Blues have been searching for THE guy between the pipes for as long, or perhaps longer than the Cleveland Browns have been looking for a franchise quarterback. The comparisons are pretty apt as it seems the Browns have the same issues when it comes to timing.
Right now, the Blues are in one of those in-between phases. Jake Allen is not the goalie that many want, though he has plenty of talent when he’s right. That said, this team is not one piece away.
The issues run up and down this roster. Finding a different goaltender is akin to putting the last puzzle piece in place to finish the border and saying you’re finished. You have that entire middle to take care of too though.
So, it is with great disgust and dismay that we are now forced to deal with the sudden rumors on the trade winds dealing with goaltenders. As much of a fan of Allen as I am, if it made sense, I would be for it.
Nothing anyone has presented makes any sense though, other than to say there was a change. It’s like the guy who can’t afford McDonald’s going out and getting a new car. Anyway, here are the five reasons trading for a goaltender right now is the absolute worst idea.
5. The Options Cause As Many Problems As They Solve
Everyone loves to play GM. They all think it’s just fantasy sports or like on EA Sports NHL series. Come back to the real world, please. Save us all the grief of reading this nonsense over and over on social media.
Even when the team has been clicking alright, in past years, you could hardly go a day without some insane post about how the Blues should trade for Carey Price or Sergei Bobrovsky or whatever name was hot at the time. If you try to explain how that won’t work, they just brush you off or say a good GM would make it work. It makes me want to pound my head on the desk.
The same is true right now. We still have people banging the drum for Carey Price. You can claim he is still elite and I won’t argue completely, but the contract is simply insane.
Price is being paid $10.5 million per season. That kind of contract would ruin the Blues now and it would ruin them in years to come. Also, Price’s deal runs through 2025 when he will be 38. He is already injury prone and as someone who is around that age now, I can tell you that things don’t tend to feel better with age.
Then, we have these lovely Jimmy Howard rumors. That makes about as much sense putting an ice cream cone in the microwave.
Howard is 34. Even if you argue goalies tend to get better with age, Detroit has been trying to get rid of him for years and never found a suitable replacement. Do you really want to put your faith in someone like that?
Both of those guys have had their game totals go up and down due to injury or inconsistent play and sometimes a combination of the two. Howard, surprisingly, has actually been more consistent than Price, so that shows you how much stats can actually fool you since almost nobody would think of Howard as the better goalie.
Each one puts the Blues in a financial bind too. If you bring in the Carey monstrosity, you have to trade two or three players away just to make the numbers work.
Howard’s contract is around $1 million more than Allen. So, even then you may have to include extra players to make the salary cap issues work.
This is not baseball where you can say to Cardinals’ management, just do it and worry about it later. There are structures in place that make these things much harder than just making a deal.
Neither one of these players, nor any of the names people bring up, would be simple additions.
4. No Goaltender Can Solve These Defensive Issues
When I became a goalie, I knew what I was signing up for. You’re the last line of defense and if you make a mistake, it will cost your team a goal 99% of the time.
That being said, the over simplification that fans use toward the position is bewildering. You can have a goalie stand on his head, make 50 saves and deserve a number one star on the night, but if the one goal allowed in a 1-0 game was a mistake, the game is the goalie’s fault.
Forget the fact that 18 players did not do their job and score a goal. Let’s not focus on the five different things that could have happened before the shot ever came. The goalie apparently should be superhuman and stop things that your average man (or woman) cannot.
Forgive me if I seem a little bitter. I just cannot stand when you attempt to defend the position and you get that blood boiling response of “Well, he needs to come up with the big save. That’s what he’s getting paid for.” I see red every time.
Credit goes to some Blues fans as, before the entire team began to look like a steaming pile, there were several out there placing blame where it belonged. However, old habits die hard and goaltending has become the focus again.
Yet, what is any goalie supposed to do with how this current group of Blues is defending. I am not even just talking about defenders, but the entire team.
St. Louis can have multiple players around their net, but they cannot clear the puck away. The Blues have no clue about how to defend the backdoor play, leaving gaping nets open that no goaltender could save.
The breakaways and odd-man rushes against due to turnovers is astoundingly high. The lack of a consistent backcheck is disturbing, at best, and maddening at worst.
The way this current group defends, you could take any Hall of Fame goaltender in their prime and this team would not be any different. Pick any name – Patrick Roy, Martin Brodeur, Glenn Hall, Ken Dryden – and 99% of the goals are still going in.
Nobody in today’s NHL or any era’s NHL is changing this team right now. Even in the best case scenario, if you want to blame Allen for the ticky tac goals earlier in the year, you gain maybe two or three wins. That still has the Blues under .500 at the moment.
The Blues have also been shutout three times in their first 20 games and scored one goal in three other games. Goalies aren’t fixing that.
3. Jake Allen Is FINE
I know this section is going to get me the most flak, but I don’t care anymore. I will beat this one until Allen wins or is out of town.
The funny thing is, even as a fan of his, I see the faults. There are goals he gives up that he needs to save. He plays too deep in his net sometimes. The glove hand is a little slow now and then.
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You know who else we could say that about? 90% of the goalies in the league have the same problems. The reason you don’t hear about it or don’t see it is because the focus is on the Blues and only the Blues.
I’m not saying this is a media problem, but there is so much coverage on baseball or football that you know more about other players and what they’re doing well or wrong. In hockey, there is so little discussion of the sport, unless you follow it religiously, you don’t get a good picture.
Yes, Allen’s stats are not what they need to be. But, stats are deceiving at times. As mentioned in an earlier slide, Howard actually has better or more consistent numbers than Price. Their career numbers are almost identical. Anyone who claims Howard’s best is equal to Price’s best is smoking something though.
In the same vein, to the same point in their careers, Allen has similar numbers to Corey Crawford.
Crawford has two Stanley Cup rings. Chicago put the right team in front of him to let him succeed. The Blues have not really done that for Allen.
Again, as a fan of his, even I will admit that the time to hope for him being elite is gone. At this stage, Allen is simply serviceable. But, when he is on his game, he can steal you wins if you give him help. This current group is not giving him help.
Early in the 2018-19 season, Allen had a hiccup here or there. For the most part, he has kept the Blues in far more games than they deserved and they could not or would not reward him for it.
I just do not get the hate for the position or the player. Blues fans refuse to look at the way the Buffalo Sabres are playing as a team. They only want to focus on Carter Hutton because they had a crush on him.
Put Hutton on this team and they are the same. Maybe they win a game or two extra, but they are still near the bottom. The same is true if you have Brian Elliott on this team. Having those guys back there would not magically make the defense know how to not screen the goalie or knock pucks into their own net.
The thing is that fans everywhere are against their current goalie. Thankfully, they are not in charge of actual team decisions.
Blues fans often fail to realize that there were vocal fans in Pittsburgh wanting Marc-Andre Fleury out any year they did not win the Cup. Crawford may have two rings, but he’s often been just as divisive in Chicago. Tuukka Rask is enemy number one until he’s the hero. People in Montreal were more than willing to get rid of Price back in the day and wanted to keep Jaroslav Halak.
Maybe that is not a glowing support of Allen, but it is the facts. Just about any goalie that is on the Blues’ wishlist is the one someone else wants to get rid of. That means, there can be the same problems or new ones.
Chris Osgood was mediocre with any team other than Detroit. Hall of Fame goalies had Hall of Fame defenders. To think the team’s only problem is Jake Allen is just insane.
2. Trading Prospects Is Foolish
I am not 100% against trading prospects like some fans are. If you are getting proven talent, then you should consider it since you never know whether a prospect will pan out or not.
That said, I find the amount of people saying this team should tank and rebuild while still saying they should trade guys for someone like Howard hysterical. Those are basically polar opposite reactions.
If we look at the Howard situation by itself, then making anything more than a player for player swap of Howard and Allen would make no sense at all.
Howard does not improve this team in 2018-19 to the point they become a contender. He is a free agent in the summer of 2019, so anything you give up is basically renting him and losing just the same. Even if you wanted to re-sign him for a year or two, the prospect you give up would likely be NHL ready by the time you are ready to move on to Ville Husso or anyone else.
Then, we have to consider the names thrown in here. While there is little concrete reporting going into this rumor, the popular names coming up are Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou. Some fans have thrown Klim Kostin into the mix as well. On Facebook, I saw people willing to give up Sammy Blais or Jake Walman.
I ask a simple question. Why would you give any of them up? What does Howard provide that is anything more than what you currently get from Allen or Chad Johnson when compared to what you are giving up? The answer is nothing.
We don’t yet know if Thomas will be a number one center, but he sure as hell looks like a good NHL player. I’m not giving that up for a rental or, if re-signed, an aging goalie that has had the same issues as the one you’re giving up on.
Kyrou might not come anywhere near to the point totals he showed as a junior player, but if the goal is to become faster, I’m not going to give up one of the fastest guys we have seen come through this organization. The Blues lack any toughness right now, so why would I give up on Blais when he’s the only player actually willing to throw a hit.
We are all disappointed that Kostin has not lit up the AHL and demanded a spot on this Blues team. It’s not easy to start over in a foreign country though and we have seen the Blues give up on plenty of players only for them to hit their stride elsewhere.
Like I said, I’m not a hoard all your prospects kind of guy. If there was a deal out there that made sense for now and for the future, you have to look at it. That is not the case right now. The Blues need to be planning on those names to be their future, not some other team’s future.
1. Ryan Miller Repeat
No offense to Ryan Miller, since he’s had a heck of a career and has managed to transition into a really good backup toward the end of his playing days. But, that deal has to go down as the biggest backfire of Doug Armstrong’s tenure here.
If the Blues trade for a goalie now, it would be deja vu all over again. In fact, it might actually be worse. That team was at least close to being ready. This team is not and you might give away pieces that could help them in the future.
Sometimes we forget that the Miller trade was not an all-out failure. Miller won 10 of his 19 starts with the Blues. It was not exactly all his fault the team lost in six games to Chicago in the playoffs either. It is just easier to refer to the situation as the Ryan Miller deal.
The reality is that this team is not a goaltender away. Their issues are far too deep. If you trade for a goaltender now, all you are doing is subjecting him to the worst the St. Louis fan base has to offer.
Whoever the new guy ends up being will get the Miller treatment. Miller won some games and played well, but because he did not live up to the lofty expectations of an increasingly frustrated group of fans, he was a failure and they let him know about it.
We can pretend that athletes don’t hear or read these things. We can say that fans are allowed to do what they want because they paid for the ticket. The reality is these people are humans and it is easier to go elsewhere, to better situations, than deal with that kind of negativity sometimes.
Nobody is saying St. Louis is as harsh as Philadelphia or New York or Boston can be. However, sometimes when there are fewer people, the negative reaction can seem louder.
So, what would be the real point? If you bring in Howard, you are basically saying you need a holdover. That might be the one year he has left until the end of this season or a short-term contract afterward. But, we all know or should know, Howard is not the answer. So, Howard gets to end his career with a team in transition and a fan base not willing to wait much longer. He’ll get the blame and the boot eventually too.
Bring in Carey Price and it’s the same thing. This team is not now, nor is it apparently that close to being a goaltender away. Even if Price manages to stay healthy and finds his form again, the current group is a seven or eight seed at best and that is being extremely positive. By the time the team is ready, Price is likely to be hurt again or past his prime.
The bottom line is that goaltending is going to continue to be a problem for this team, one way or the other. Trade for Price or sign Bobrovsky and you’re going to keep yourself in cap hell.
Bring in Howard and you have an aging goaltender that solves none of the issues the team has and has all the same problems their current goalie does.
Next. The Blues Are Taking The Fun Out Of The Sport. dark
All fans won’t be happy under any circumstance, but I hope that Doug Armstrong does not listen to the ones that think goaltending is the issue. Firing a coach had little affect on this current group, so I doubt having a new goalie would provide much support either.
Fans can keep thinking simple if they wish, but no one player will save this current team.