You can't blame St. Louis Blues GM Doug Armstrong. No, the team hasn't been able to enact any trades thus far this NHL season, but it's not for a lack of trying. According to Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman, Armstrong and the Blues have been and continue to be one of the most active teams on the trade front. Unfortunately, a variety of factors - mostly the sagging Canadian dollar - have stripped the NHL marketplace bare.
"And it's not like teams aren't trying," Friedman said, while appearing on Edmonton's 630 CHED, via Today's Slap Shot's transcription. "I have guys tell me they make a call to four different teams and they'll say, 'Yeah, we want to make a deal.' 'We want to make a deal.' Then they look at it, and they can't make a deal.
"St. Louis is I think a team that would like to do something, and I think at times they've talked to you guys about doing something, but obviously that hasn't happened."
The Blues have been beset this season by quite the wave of injuries. Patrik Berglund, Jaden Schwartz, Paul Statsny, Kevin Shattenkirk, Colton Parayko and Robby Fabbri have all missed time and in some cases, like Berglund, continue to miss time this year. Despite the injury woes, the deep and talented Blues have continued doing what they do best - performing well during the regular season. They're currently tied with the defending Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks for the second-best record in the West and looking very much like the playoff contender many expected them to be after Armstrong enacted something of a roster facelift this offseason.
Still, as was shown clearly by the outcome of the Blues' last two games - a victory over the red hot Dallas Stars and a loss to the struggling Colorado Avalanche - St. Louis remains a team in flux. Injuries, of course, are a large part of that.
"We are 'one win, one loss, one win, one loss. It's hard when we feel like we're gaining momentum. We play such a great game (Saturday) night against Dallas and we come back and we lose to a divisional opponent," Shattenkirk told Jeremy Rutherford of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after the loss to his former Avs teammates.
While a trade won't necessarily fix everything that ails a consistently inconsistent Blues team, it would likely serve notice to Ken Hitchcock and his charges that there needs to be a more concerted effort to follow good games with better ones. The limitations of the NHL market will dictate whether Armstrong can actually pull something off, and it's never a good idea to enact a trade just for the sake of change, but once the latter portion of the season rolls around, there won't be any margin for error. And the Blues under Hitchcock have too often proven that they're unable to get it done when it really counts.
Which likely has Armstrong, and legions of Blues fans, struggling to fall asleep at night.
