The Blues Are Trying to Retool on the Fly
Jeremy Rutherford of The Athletic was on Sirius XM NHL Network Radio Power Play Segment with Steve Kouleas and Andrew Raycroft on Monday and was asked what is the current direction of the St. Louis Blues and do they consider themselves in a retool or rebuild.
NHLRumors.com Transcriptions
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Mick Kern: “So now he’s here, up until this point. If I said to you, what is the Blues identity? What’s their MO? I know the identity of MO, the 2019 team. What’s the identity and MO of this team?”
Jeremy Rutherford: “So I think, I think the best way to explain that it’s a little bit multifaceted and we have to look at the big picture and understand that they are in a retool. And I think their roster is just in a little bit of flux right now. You still have the Brandon Saad’s, you have some players up front, Brayden Schenn on a long-term contract.
Are these guys going to be around in a few years when the Blues really start to feel like they’re going to take that next step? When some of their prospects come in and develop like Jimmy Snuggerud from Minnesota, like Dalibor Dvorsky, who’s in the minor leagues right now, a top-10 overall pick a couple of years ago.
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So I think right now, the state that they’re in, they’re trying to win with kind of this hodgepodge roster that they have. So it’s hard to me to look at them and say, this is their identity. I think they want to be hard on the forecheck and be a little closer to that 2019 team than they have been the past couple years. But I don’t know that they have the roster to do that.
They want to be a rush team. They’ve got a Robert Thomas and a Jordan Kyrou who are capable of that. But do they have a rest of their roster who can be like that? So I think at the end of the day, for these couple years that they’re in this situation with the retool, waiting on certain guys to develop and get to the next level and play in the NHL, I think they’re just going to have to be hard to play against. And they have not been that way this season.
So that’s the thing where they’re going to have to get to if they’re going to have success during this period.”
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