St. Louis Blues April Fools: Top 5 draft picks that were foolish

Reasoner/Backman

I feel kind of bad including these guys in this category because they had OK NHL careers. They were not good but not terrible either.

Marty Reasoner played in 798 games, had 97 goals and 266 points. You would think he might have stuck around for those two extra games or three extra goals, but I digress.

Christian Backman played in 302 career games. His stats weren’t that bad, with 23 goals and 79 points for a defenseman in an era when goals were a little lower.

However, the problem with these two is not so much themselves, but with the team. These were the Blues first two first-round picks in forever.

In fact, the Blues only had three first-round picks in the entire decade of the 1990’s. The Blues traded some of their picks and some were taken away for “illegal” tampering, such as with Brendan Shanahan, Mike Keenan and Scott Stevens.

Whatever the case, the Blues rarely got to pick in the first round of the draft. When it finally came time for them to make an actual pick, you would have hoped it would be a homerun.

Instead, two of their three picks turned out to be a bunt attempt for a single, to keep the analogy going. Reasoner played parts of three seasons with the Blues and Backman.

Reasoner’s main claim to fame with the Blues was being traded for Doug Weight. At least we got something out of that.

Backman just faded away. He was not bad with the Blues, but played on some of their worst teams, though 19 of his 23 career goals were with the Blues. Eventually he was traded to the New York Rangers, Columbus Blue Jackets and then signed with a team in Sweden.

Keith Osborne

Have you ever heard the tragedy of Darth Keith Osborne? I apologize, but the quarantine is affecting me.

Anyway, it’s not a tale the Jedi…I mean it’s probably not a name many have heard of. Osborne was selected by the Blues in the first round of the 1987 Entry Draft. He was taken with the 12th overall pick.  (p.s. the picture is just from 1987, none were taken of Osborne that we are free to use)

Even in the mid-to-late 1980’s, you would expect someone taken in the first half of the draft to have a decent overall career. Osborne went on to play sixteen NHL games.

He only played five games with the Blues and only recorded two assists. Thankfully, for him, he went on to play 11 games with the Tampa Bay Lightning and did score a goal, so at least he’s got that puck to put on the mantle or wherever they put those pucks.

The thing that makes Osborne’s selection worse, from a Blues perspective, is who they passed up on. Any draft can be viewed differently in hindsight, as we will see, but this one had some impressive names.

St. Louis could have taken Stephane Quintal, Bryan Marchment or even Joe Sakic instead of Osborne. It should be noted that 13 other teams passed on Sakic before he was taken, so the Blues are not alone, but that does not make it any better.

If you go later in the draft, the Blues could have had Stephane Matteau, John LeClair, Mathieu Schneider or Eric Desjardins. Plenty of those names ended up on Stanley Cup teams and Sakic went to the Hall of Fame.

Again, it’s not Osborne’s fault that the Blues saw something in him. He actually had a decent minor league career.

He scored 23 goals and 47 points with the Peoria Rivermen (he would score 23 goals and 51 points when returning to Peoria later), while still in the Blues organization. His career year was 40 goals and 91 points with the Atlanta Knights of the now defunct IHL.

He just could not break through and do anything in the NHL. Given the amount of teams that passed up on some of those other names, the Blues were not alone in their curious pick, but only three picks in that entire first round played fewer than 100 games and the Blues pick was one of them.

Marty Ruff

If you thought Keith Osborne was bad, at least he played in the NHL. Marty Ruff, the team’s first pick in 1981 played exactly zero games in the big league.  That’s why I had to use a random picture from 1981.

Ruff’s main claim to fame at this point, as far as hockey goes, is being Lindy Ruff‘s brother.

You might wonder why the Blues would take a player in the first round, 20th overall pick, that played no games. The answer is likely that his junior stats were decent at the time.

Ruff was a defenseman during a time when offensive defensemen were still a rarity, other than Bobby Orr. Ray Bourque had just come on the scene, so the Blues were likely looking for someone in that mold.

Ruff had scored nine goals and 47 points with the Lethbridge Broncos of the WHL. That is likely what caught the eye of the scouts.

Unfortunately, he never produced anything close to that again. In fact, he barely even played as a professional hockey player.

Ruff’s first season as a pro, he only saw 46 games between the Toledo Goaldiggers and Muskegon Mohawks of the IHL. The most games he ever played afterward was 44 with the Peoria Rivermen in 1985-86.

That was his final season in a major professional league. Given the time frame and how different things worked back then, who knows if he even got to ever practice with the Blues in a preseason format.

2002 Draft

Normally, when talking about a foolish draft pick, you focus on a single pick. However, in 2002, the Blues went overboard.

I’m not quite sure what happened. Perhaps Larry Pleau thought his team was still on the rise, since they defeated the Chicago Blackhawks in the first round of that series. Maybe he was still stunned after they got stomped in five games against the Detroit Red Wings.

Whatever the reason, Pleau basically hit the auto-draft option as if he was playing EA Sports NHL 2002. Whatever the reason, things did not turn out well.

St. Louis had nine picks in the 2002 Entry Draft. Between all of them, there was a grand total of 140 games played in the NHL.

Making matters worse, those games all belong to two players. D.J. King played 118 games and was more of a modern-day fighter than anything. Tom Koivisto played in 22 games and the defensmen had a total of six points.

It should be noted that the Blues did not have a first-round pick in 2002. Even with that caveat, there is no reason to whiff that badly.

King was the team’s sixth-round pick, drafted 190th overall. Koivisto was taken in the eighth round, 253rd overall.

St. Louis got 0 NHL games out of their first five selections in that draft. Just think about that for one moment and don’t gloss over it. The Blues got no NHL games out of their first five selections, two of which were second rounders, and finally got an NHL enforcer out of their sixth round pick.

It boggles the mind.

Erik Johnson

For the last selection, Erik Johnson has the dubious result of being a pick that was foolish. Clearly, in a vacuum, that would be harsh.

Johnson has proven to be a decent NHL player over the course of his career. In 12 seasons in the NHL he’s got 80 goals, over 300 points and is closing in on 800 games played.

Those are not numbers to just brush aside and scoff at. The problem for Johnson is who could/should have been taken instead and also how things went in St. Louis. We’ll start with the latter.

The Blues drafted Johnson in the 2006 NHL Entry Draft. While real puck heads followed this stuff all the time, 2005 and 2006 were the first real times when Blues fans became aware of who was being drafted.

Mostly that was because the team was bad enough to get high picks. Still, St. Louis took T.J. Oshie in 2005 and got Johnson and Patrik Berglund in 2006.

There was reason to start looking up. St. Louis had some good young kids, just waiting to get into the NHL.

Despite finishing with just 21 wins, the Blues did not bring Johnson to the league immediately. Whether that was his decision to play a year at Minnesota or the team thinking a year of college would be good is anyone’s guess.

However, Blues fans would have to wait even longer to see him in action as much as they thought. Johnson averaged around 18 minutes in his rookie season and only scored five goals and 33 points.

Those were not terrible numbers, but it was not what fans wanted from a first-overall pick. Then, the bottom fell out.

Johnson missed the entire 2008-09 season due to a knee injury. While there are varying accounts, it basically boiled down to him getting injured by a golf cart during the offseason. Some think they had too much to drink and he slipped out, others say he got ran into. Regardless, it was a non-playing injury that took him out of action.

The Blues had just brought Alex Pietrangelo into the fold at the start of the season, so many were excited to see these two cornerstone players on the blue line. Instead, we got eight games for Petro and none for Johnson. It was only a miracle run at the end of that season that saw them make the playoffs.

Johnson showed signs of life the following year. He had 10 goals and 39 points, but was struggling in 2010-11 and the Blues traded him to Colorado.

The trade, of course, was best for both teams. St. Louis got parts of seven seasons with Kevin Shattenkirk and probably got the best out of Chris Stewart too. Johnson has found his way to being a solid top-four, often top-two defender in Colorado as well.

However, the problem was not just numbers. The real reason this was a foolish pick is because the Blues could have had another franchise player in Jonathan Toews.

Take away all the years of hatred toward him due to who he’s played for and what he’s accomplished for that team. Towes is not a Sidney Crosby or Wayne Gretzky. However, I would put him in a similar category as Mark Messier.

They both could score when needed. They both led by example and that was more what the Blues would have needed at that time.

You cannot simply say the Blues win those Cups instead of Chicago if they had Toews. St. Louis would have needed players around Toews like Chicago had.

However, in hindsight, there is not a Blues fan among us that can honestly say they would not have made the swap and taken Toews instead of Johnson.

St. Louis could have had Jordan Staal, Phil Kessel, Nicklas Backstrom or even Claude Giroux. Each one of those had some baggage or runins with fans/media/managment along the way, so you could fall back on the idea the Blues needed a defender and still took Johnson.

Given the combination of skill and leadership and his ability to keep his mouth shut, for the most part, you can’t make that argument with Johnson over Toews. Johnson has proven to be a capable player, but Toews would have been a number one pick.