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.