The St. Louis Blues have spent the early part of the offseason tearing things down and building them back up at the same time, and the result is a roster that looks younger, tougher and a little hard to pin down.
After the NHL Entry Draft and the opening stretch of free agency, St. Louis has already made some of the summer’s loudest moves.
The club traded forward Jordan Kyrou and multiple first-round picks, bought out Jonathan Drouin, and added forwards Connor McMichael and Mason McTavish, defenseman Brandon Carlo and prospect Milton Gastrin. It’s a busy, scattered-looking overhaul, but for a team that badly needed a retool, it’s at least a meaningful one.
The biggest swing came with Kyrou. Moving a bona fide top-six scorer always carries risk, especially when the player in question is 28 and coming off an offensively shaky season.
Still, the Blues didn’t just dump him for pennies. St.
Louis landed McMichael, the No. 16 pick in this year’s draft, and Gastrin in the deal, which gives the trade a fair amount of value for a player who was clearly in demand. Kyrou’s production dipped, and McMichael’s did too, which is part of why a change of scenery makes sense for both sides.
The other major gamble was the McTavish deal. St.
Louis gave up two first-round picks to get the 24-year-old, a former third-overall selection with plenty of upside and a rough year behind him. There’s obvious appeal here: good hands, a heavy shot and plenty of offensive skill.
But the concern remains the same one that follows McTavish around - skating. The Blues are betting that his power-forward game will translate even if the top-end speed never fully catches up.
Drouin’s buyout was the move that looked cleanest on paper and strangest in practice. He was due $4MM, and after a disappointing first season of his two-year deal, St.
Louis decided to move on. Drouin had signed with the New York Islanders last summer, then was quickly shipped out in the Brayden Schenn trade.
He had been effective with the Colorado Avalanche before that, but last season never clicked with either the Islanders or the Blues. Now he’s a UFA.
What made the buyout unusual was that St. Louis didn’t really turn the savings into another significant addition beyond the Ross Johnston signing, instead leaving the cap space sitting there.
With a full 23-man roster and more than $10MM available, the Blues may not spend it at all. The simplest explanation may be that they’re working under an internal cap and needed to save actual dollars.
Johnston and Dillon Dube were the other notable additions on the first day of free agency. Johnston got a three-year, $6MM deal and brings the kind of sandpaper that’s pretty much his calling card at this point. Dube signed for the league minimum on a one-year contract and remains something of a question mark at the NHL level, having not played an NHL game since January 2024.
For all the chaos, there’s a clear thread here: St. Louis decided not to wait around and hope picks or prospects eventually turn into something useful. By turning Kyrou and extra first-rounders into younger, NHL-ready pieces, the Blues have made themselves harder to play against while keeping a core that still includes Robert Thomas, Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway.
The execution hasn’t exactly been tidy. But the Blues are in transition, and some of these moves should give a stale group a different kind of energy after a season that left some people around the team feeling pretty pessimistic about the trades made near the deadline.
St. Louis got younger this summer, and the real judgment won’t come until they hit the ice next October.
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Jim Montgomery Faces A Blues Roster Crunch That Could Define Next Season
Jim Montgomery enters his second season behind the Blues bench with a 72-51-19 record since taking over on Nov. 24, 2024, but the bigger story now is less about what happened last year and more about how crowded things have become. St. Louis is moving deeper into a youth-focused phase, and that means a growing list of players will be chasing a shrinking number of jobs as the roster takes shape for next season.
Training camp is going to matter, and the preseason may matter even more, because Montgomery has to sort through new additions and prospects while figuring out who is ready for NHL minutes. For a team trying to balance development with competitiveness, the next few weeks could go a long way toward defining the lineup the Blues carry into opening night and beyond. [Read more 🡒]