What is the plan going forward for the Blues?

All the way back in the fall, the St. Louis Blues were among the teams that had some hope of qualifying for the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs. Months later, those dreams look as though they’ll fall short, even after the team did not trade either Robert Thomas nor Jordan Kyrou ahead of last Friday’s Trade Deadline. 

On Tuesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, Jeff Marek, host of The Sheet, joins hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Steve Peters to break down the plan moving forward for St. Louis, with Alex Steen set to take over in Doug Armstrong’s role as GM after the end of the current campaign. 

Steve Peters: What is the Blues’ plan over this summer? What do they do? Are they now standing pat and they’re going to be a playoff team next year or are they still going to try to make some of these big deals over the summer? 

Jeff Marek: It’s a great question. First of all, I do think a lot of it depends on how quickly Dalibor Dvorský can become a legitimate, full-time second-line center. I think that’s going to fuel a lot of what Doug Armstrong slash Alex Steen does coming up in the off-season. I do think that there are some pieces there. There are some players there that will still be very much available. I, like many of us, still wonder about Jordan Kyrou. I know there was some talk about him with the New York Islanders, and I had wondered if the Washington Capitals, who’ve been looking to add more speed, would be interested.  I don’t think that Washington stopped wanting to get faster, so I still think that Kyrou is a possibility. Pius Suter, I think, was an interesting name this year as well. If Dvorský can distinguish himself as a top-six center. What happens to Suter in this situation, and how close are the kids? 

So I don’t know that this is one of those elephants in the room. They’ve got to do something about the blue line. This is why they made the Logan Mailloux deal last year, the right-shot defenseman. 

They still have a need for right shot defenseman. That’s why Montreal would have made some sense for any type of Robert Thomas deal, mainly because they have the young right-shot D that St Louis would covet. I don’t necessarily know that this one would need a full strip-down. I think this might just be for Alex Steen here, maybe a slight step back. But depending on where you know Jake Neighbors is, and depending on where some of their younger players are, then all of a sudden, you can either take a further step backwards, or you can say look at that top line like Holloway, Thomas, and Snuggerud and say that would look really, really good together, right? 

Then the bigger question is at what point can Joel Hofer take this net, and when he does, does that make you know the other suspect in the net, who we’ve spent so much time talking about over and over and over and over again? Does that finally mean the end of Jordan Binnington in St Louis? I don’t think it’s a massive rebuild here, but a lot of it depends on how many steps the younger kids can take.

You can catch Marek’s full insight and the rest of Tuesday’s show here…