I was very critical and down on the St. Louis Blues offseason heading into the 2023-24 campaign. The Blues (who said farewell to head coach Craig Berube before all was said and done and replacing him with Drew Bannister, initially on an interim basis before removing that tag) were the highest ranked team out of the playoffs in the western conference, trailing the Vegas Golden Knights by 6 points on the last day of the regular season. Following this disappointment, the Doug Armstrong evaluated his roster and clearly decided that he would stay the course with the core group of Robert Thomas, Jordan Kyrou, Pavel Buchnevich, and Colton Parayko, and made a series of smaller upgrades at depth positions.

               In the forward group, the team made a variety of pickups including the likes of Dylan Holloway, Mathieu Joseph, and Radek Faksa. Joseph and Faksa have been career bottom-six players. Faksa specializes in shot blocking and playing large penalty killing minutes but is otherwise a low-impact player in all other phases of the game. Joseph has established a reputation through decent GAR numbers (Averaging 6+ over the past three seasons) of being one of the higher impact 10-12 minute per night forwards in the league and will be an asset for the Blues’ depth. Holloway was a young, depth piece for the Edmonton Oilers for the past two seasons. At this stage of his career, Holloway will either be testing the waters as a middle-six winger this season or playing down on the fourth line and adjusting to a new team and system. Either way, there are a lot of question marks for which direction his career development will go in this year. Similarly, the Blues made three additions to their blue line in Ryan Suter, Pierre-Oliver Joseph, and Philip Broberg. At 39 years old, Suter is still a viable stay-at-home defender, with more offensive instincts on zone exits (mainly due to experience) than many of his peers with his playing style. Joseph has spent his last few seasons playing between the NHL and AHL with the Penguins organization, and still has been unable to establish himself as anything greater than a low impact third pairing/seventh defenseman in the NHL. Broberg is an interesting acquisition, as he showed flashes of exceptional potential during the 2022-23 season for the Oilers in 46 games, but Ken Holland’s regime buried him down in the minors for most of the 2023-24 campaign. With decent deployment and coaching, it would be interesting to see if Broberg can be the more complete version of Torey Krug that Blues need to be a playoff caliber team.

               Moving to the draft, the Blue made some interesting selections. The Blues used their first three selections on stay-at-home, transitional defensemen in Adam Jiricek, Colin Ralph, and Lukas Fischer. This continues their trend from last season of drafting players (Excluding Dalibor Dvorsky) that have a decent chance of playing at the NHL level to varying degrees of effectiveness in the defensive and neutral zones, but once again ignoring the need to find star players to complement their young core. Normally, I wouldn’t be so critical of this, but I constantly allude to the aging blue line in St. Louis, and how difficult it is to cultivate high-impact puck-moving defensemen that take pressure off the forward group in the offensive zone. At this point, the only player in their organization that has the ceiling to be a star-level impact in the offensive zone from the blue line is Michael Buchinger unless someone has an unprecedented shift in playing style and ability.

               Overall, the Blues had a good offseason, despite my criticism of their defensive prospect pool, earning them a B-. This team does not have any glaring deficiencies aside from their D-corp’s offensive ability so closely mirroring that of the Los Angeles Kings. This can be rectified if Broberg or Joseph takes a big step this season. The team has a chance to make the postseason this year if they stay healthier than the rest of their conference.