Blues GM called St. Louis' start "unexpected three months"
MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. -- Doug Armstrong confesses he has no issues running two squads.
Obviously leading the management group with the St. Louis Blues as president of hockey operations and general manager while also being the GM for Team Canada for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy hasn’t deviated one from the other.
“That hasn’t been an issue,” Armstrong said. “There’s enough time in the day to do that. The team Canada part’s different because we’re looking at different players.”
Armstrong will have a star-studded lineup in Milan. The more pressing matters are what’s happening in St. Louis with the Blues, who are disappointing to say the least despite a recent rash of injuries, at 12-15-7 through 34 games (31 points).
And it’s been the kind of start that, well, wasn’t expected.
“It’s been an unexpected first three months than I thought when we started the season, we had a lot of hope, we had a lot of belief, we had a lot of excitement,” Armstrong said. “Really, coming off that game in Vancouver (Oct. 13, a 5-2 win), now I’m going back a long time, we really felt good. We found a way to play well the second half of that Calgary game (a 4-2 win Oct. 11) and turn that over to an excellent game in Vancouver. Whatever happened on that plane ride home, we really haven’t been able to find any stable footing for any long period of time and it’s been tasking to find out why, I guess is the hardest part. I don’t have the exact dates, we started playing good hockey but we weren’t scoring. A lot of 2-1 losses, 3-2 losses, shootout losses, overtime losses, but it felt like our game (was) coming. Since that point where it looked like it was coming, we’ve reverted back to not playing that game on a consistent basis that gives us a chance to win. Injuries happen, everyone has them, and it’s just our turn to deal with them, but we’re not playing well enough to overcome them right now, and that’s disappointing. I’m not saying we’re the Florida Panthers, we’re not making that comparison, but they’re finding a way to galvanize and push through where we haven’t found a way yet. And when you look at our year to date, it feels like there’s a different leak in the draft, and so we’re running out of fingers. We’re plugging one, whether it’s our expected goal or against was better than the product that night and then our goal scoring and our penalty kill was poor and now it’s good, and then our power play is good and now it’s not. Like we haven’t been able to really just become a functioning, stable group for a long period of time and it’s disappointing because I thought this year was going to be different and I think organizationally, the people around us felt it was going to be different. I think the NHL in general thought we would be a different team that our record shows we are, and that’s disappointing.”
A lot of the surprise stems from the fact the Blues, who took the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Winnipeg Jets to seven games in the Western Conference first round, returned 20 of the 23 players that seemed determined more than ever to redeem themselves from the heartbreak ending of Game 7, which resulted in a 4-3 double overtime loss.
Well …
“I think we talked in training camp is that what we talked about last year was not sustainable,” Armstrong said. “As well as we played last year, I didn’t think this team was going to pick up and threaten Boston’s single-season point total, but I didn’t think it would go back this far. Obviously we all hoped as an organization we learned last year how to be competitive night in, night out, what sacrifices and obviously we haven’t incorporated the lessons that we learned last year to anywhere near the level that’s going to be needed for all of us to get back moving forward.”
There are many reasons the Blues have floundered thus far, and there’s no one pointed reason why. There are quite frankly several.
“We haven’t found anything that we revert back to when things aren’t going well,” Armstrong said. “The part of the teams that I’ve watched and functioned at a high level, they know they can get back to Ground Zero quickly and build up. We haven’t found that ability to find our calling card and get back to it and then build from it fast. A little bit like I’ve seen in the past where one turns into three goals real quick. Usually 1) you’re able to snap and get back to foundation and build again so there’s a whole host of reasons. I wish if it was one single one, I think we could fix it relatively quickly, but as I said, I go back to the analogy it’s we’re running out of fingers because it’s one and you can go we’ve got that figured out and then another one pops up.
“I’m not doing this to point fingers at anyone. It’s an organizational thing, but there’s not one thing that can say if we fix this right now, we should be back to where building what we want because when we fix one thing, something else breaks, and that’s the disappointing part is there’s no stability in really much of what we’re doing.”
But let’s face it, from those that watch on a regular basis, including those that cover the team on a regular basis, understand that it starts at the top, and I mean top of the lineup.
The Blues’ top-end players simply haven’t been good enough. The Robert Thomas,’ the Pavel Buchnevich’s, the Jordan Kyrou’s, even at the start of the season, the Dylan Holloway’s, the Brayden Schenn’s, Colton Parayko’s, Cam Fowler’s, all of them, from offensively to defensively.
“I don’t want to single out guys,” Armstrong said. “Collectively, the players that have scored for us in the past were all cold at the same time and that rarely happens. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out why. That’s our job as management and as coaches is to try and figure out why and put the players in a better position to have success, but we weren’t scoring and instead of having a foundational belief of defending, it felt like we wanted to score, so we put ourselves in potential scoring positions that turned into scoring positions for the opposition, if that makes any sense, and then it started to snowball. Players had career years the last couple of, I thought there would be closer to a balance than what we’re seeing this year where they’re having historically unsuccessful seasons compared to what their averages are, and I wish I knew, then we’d fix it. But I don’t know why collectively we weren’t.
“That was the encouraging part of those 2-1, 3-2 games is that I just played the averages that they would start scoring. They’re too talented, and if we keep it, our defense and we’re getting good goaltending at that time, our penalty kill was vastly improved and we were staying in games. My faith in these guys that bad breaks would turn into good breaks and the puck would start to go into the net and we had that foundational thing built, and then the injuries hit in and now we’re back to try and find a foundation.”
So how does one calculate who last year’s Blues were and who this year’s Blues are? Armstrong was asked if last year’s post-4 Nations Face-Off run created false hope.
“No. Not for me personally,” he said. ‘I thought that we had to come in and create our own identity, but I thought we had built a foundation enough where I thought that we could build off of that. I’m surprised that we’re not more into the middle of the pack of the league and fighting into that middle area and a good push gets you into the top 10, a bad week puts you at 20th, then you’re back at 15th, you know what I mean. That’s the majority of the league. I didn’t have an illusion that we were built to be where Colorado is right now, but I also thought we would be higher than we are.”
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Category: General Sports
