The St. Louis Blues have been a team that builds through the NHL draft. I am not saying St. Louis is not a hotspot for free agents, but that is not how this franchise builds its team. The last notable free agent the team went after was Torey Krug, but that only happened because the team let then-captain Alex Pietrangelo walk in free agency(I still will not let it go). Before Krug, you would have to look at Paul Statsny in 2014 as the last top-of-the-market free agent the Blues were able to land. The truth is the St. Louis Blues are better when they build through the draft and make smart trades where you include players you drafted to get proven players that you can add to your core(we will talk about it more later).
Some refer to draft picks as magic beans because you do not know what you will get after the first overall pick. What you hope for is a player that becomes a franchise cornerstone for years to come, but once in a while, you draft a player, and they fail to make a single appearance for the team at the NHL level. It has been over 20 years since the last time the Blues drafted someone in the first round who failed to make it to the NHL level. I am not saying the team has not had their draft busts, but they have done a great job at finding and developing players, whether at the top of the draft or near the end of the first round.
Dalibor Dvorský and Jimmy Snuggerud are the two latest Blues' first-round picks to make their NHL debuts this season. The Blues still have three more first-round prospects(Adam Jiricek, Otto Stenberg, and Theo Lindstein) in the pipeline, who we could see at the NHL level one day, but it is still too early to tell. Since 2016, the Blues have had three other players on the current roster who are essential members of the team's core moving forward. Robert Thomas leads the pack as an All-Star and the best player on the team. The other two are the young snipers in Jake Neighbours and Zack Bolduc. Not to mention Jordan Kyrou, who the Blues stole in the second round in 2016, but we are focusing on the first-round selections. Both seem to have the potential to be perennial 30-goal scorers for years to come. The only first-round pick who never really became a mainstay in the Blues lineup was their 2017 pick, Klim Kostin. He spent three seasons in St. Louis but did not live up to his first-round potential. The Blues traded Kostin to the Edmonton Oilers for Dmitri Samorukov, who played two games with the team and now plays in the KHL.
I mentioned earlier that the Blues have also been able to flip young prospects for proven talent. That is where the final two first-round picks I have not mentioned since 2016 come in. In 2018, the Blues selected Dominik Bokk with the 25th overall pick, and he is the only Blues draft pick in the last 20-plus years to never appear in an NHL game. However, it is hard to judge that on the Blues because the team flipped him and Joel Edmundson for Justin Faulk just over a year later. Faulk's time in St. Louis has been up and down, but it is fair to say the team did well on that trade, considering Bokk failed to live up to his potential. The last remaining Blues first-round pick since 2016 is Tage Thompson. The Blues traded the 2016 26th overall pick with Patrick Berglund, Vladimir Sobotka, a first-round pick in 2019, and a second-round pick in 2021 in a blockbuster with the Buffalo Sabres for Ryan O'Reilly. O'Reilly was just what the Blues needed at the time. He was a legitimate first-line centre and an excellent two-way player who won the Frank J. Selke and the Conn Smythe trophy in his first season with the Blues to go with the Stanley Cup. Unlike Bokk, Thompson turned out to be a star. In his seven seasons with Buffalo, Thompson has scored over 30 goals three times and over 40 goals twice. When a trade like that breaks, the discussion is always, "But who won the trade?" It is one of the rare times when both teams can say neither is the loser. The Blues got their franchise centreman, who helped lead them to a Stanley Cup victory, and the Sabres got a star player who would kick-start their rebuild(a long rebuild).
I listed the last 11 first-round selections for the St. Louis Blues: three are still unknown, two made their NHL debuts this season, three are part of the team's core, two were traded for proven NHL players, and one did not live up to the first-round grade. For a team that does not get many top-end free agents, the Blues' ability to retool on the fly while never being at the top of the draft needs to be talked about more. Their scouting department does a fantastic job of finding players who fit the style the team is trying to play. I struggle to think of another NHL franchise that hit on first-round picks with such regularity. I truly believe it is the best in the league.