Doug Armstrong’s exit after the 2026 draft will close one chapter in St. Louis, but the plan he leaves behind is the one that matters most. The Blues are headed into a new era, yet the outline for how they’re supposed to win still looks a lot like the formula that carried them to 2019.
That idea starts with a familiar truth from the mid-2010s: St. Louis kept putting good teams on the ice without quite finding the final gear.
The 2017-18 club had plenty of firepower, with Vladimir Tarasenko, Brayden Schenn and Jaden Schwartz all in their prime, each coming off 20-goal seasons and scoring at close to a point per game. Alex Pietrangelo, meanwhile, was viewed as one of the league’s best defensemen.
Even with that talent, the Blues were boxed in. They missed the playoffs, but not badly enough to land a premium draft pick, and they didn’t have the pull to chase a star center such as John Tavares or a top defenseman like John Carlson. Armstrong had to work the margins, signing David Perron and Tyler Bozak, then swinging the trade that sent Tage Thompson, Patrik Berglund, Vladimir Sobotka, a first-round pick and a second-round pick to Buffalo for Ryan O’Reilly.
Everything broke the right way after that. O’Reilly delivered a career year, Bozak and Perron became major pieces, and rookie goalie Jordan Binnington surged onto the scene. That combination turned into the kind of run every front office dreams about.
It’s easy to see why Armstrong might still believe that path can be repeated. The names are different now, but the logic is similar: find the right additions, let the roster grow, and hope the pieces click in the same way they did six years ago. Players such as Mason McTavish and Connor McMichael are part of that kind of optimism.
The problem is that 2019-style success is a hard thing to chase. Winning a Stanley Cup without multiple Hall of Famers is extremely rare, and the source material makes that point plainly. Before 2009, no Cup winner had zero Hall of Famers, and since 1967 only two teams had won it all with fewer than three.
Since 2009, the only teams even in the conversation for having none are the 2019 Blues, the 2023 Golden Knights and the 2026 Hurricanes, and each of those clubs still had at least one player with a realistic Hall of Fame case. St. Louis, by contrast, doesn’t appear to have anyone on the current roster who looks like an easy Hall of Fame bet, let alone multiple players.
Still, the league has moved toward balance. More and more, teams are winning by spreading the load across all four lines instead of leaning on a handful of superstars. Florida in 2025 had elite talent up top, but its third line of Eetu Luostarinen, Anton Lundell and Brad Marchand was what separated it from other contenders.
That’s where the Blues may try to make their mark. Their third line has a chance to be a difference-maker this season, with options that could rotate through it in Jake Neighbors, Jonatan Berggren, Pius Suter, Otto Stenberg and Dalibor Dvorsky.
In the end, Armstrong’s blueprint looks a lot like the one from 2019: win with depth, physicality and game sense. The catch is that St. Louis struggled in those areas last season, and building a championship team that way demands near-perfect execution.
The Blues also don’t appear likely to chase a full teardown for a top draft pick, and big trade targets remain difficult to land because of no-trade clauses. So the path forward is narrower than it is glamorous. For now, it looks like Armstrong has left Steen a team built to stay patient, stay consistent and try to find that old magic again.
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For the Blues, the appeal is obvious: a skilled forward with a chance to become more than just a distant prospect if his game keeps moving in the right direction. He still has some hurdles to clear before he looks like a fit for a top-six NHL role, but the way he plays and the progress he has already made give him a chance to matter down the road, possibly as soon as the 2027-28 window. [Read more 🡒]
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For a player whose value has always been tied more to dependability than flash, the numbers tell a pretty strong story of their own. Parayko was a key piece of the Blues 2019 Stanley Cup run, and he remains under contract with a role that should keep him logging significant minutes. The quiet part of his legacy is becoming harder to ignore, especially for a franchise that has leaned on his presence for nearly a decade. [Read more 🡒]