In firing Craig Berube as head coach late Tuesday night, St. Louis Blues GM Doug Armstrong took the easy route, and likely the inevitable route, to shake up a team of his own making.
The Blues have been frustratingly inconsistent this season, with shocking highs against good teams and maddening lows against bad teams. That variability ultimately reflects the coach, yes, but more precisely this roster’s inability and perhaps passive refusal to do what the coach has preached.
What’s crazy is we’ve seen how the Blues can be competitive — with a roster that the GM conceded “third place would be nice,” essentially — when they do exactly what Berube has asked. But it happens to seldom, and the culprits are too often the players Armstrong has committed to.
“It cost a great man his role on the team, because of what was happening,” Armstrong said at his post-firing presser on Wednesday.
Armstrong is probably right to conclude that Jordan Kyrou was never going to become the player Armstrong envisioned under Craig Berube. But there’s a high risk that the bigger issue is Armstrong’s vision itself.
In his post-firing press conference, Armstrong repeatedly referred to needing to get younger players to improve and be better, yet repeated his belief in Kyrou and the other players he’s trying to make into his new core.
During his tenure, the Blues GM has kept the team among the most competitive in the league, year after year, and he’s proven able to get out of some of his biggest contract mistakes (in one case, famously, moving Patrik Berglund and Vladimir Sobotka in a package that got him the final piece of a Cup team). But in recent years those mistakes — the long-term deals and no-trade clauses to players on the bad end of the age curve — have accumulated, made even worse by the pandemic’s flat cap.
This season, night after night you’d hear veterans muse about what went wrong, and you could read between the lines how there were Armstrong-committed culprits who were not doing their job.
Meanwhile, the captain of his Cup-winning team is a second-time Cup winner in Vegas, and the blueline remains a discombobulated mess.
Whatever went down with Alex Pietrangelo’s free agency, probably both parties stubborned-their way to an unwanted divorce. Whatever went down with a top defending-champion team going into the pandemic bubble and laying an egg, that’s in the past. Whatever went down with the attempts to clear cap space by trying to trade No Trade Clause-holding veterans who do not want to be traded, those are the breaks. Whatever went down with not even getting a team-friendly extension with David Perron, we know these things happen. There’s no planning for a sudden career-ending health issue for Jay Bouwmeester. The numbers probably didn’t add up to keep Ryan O’Reilly around when the team was flailing and he was aging — and Armstrong has been prescient in walking away from similar profile vets like David Backes before.
But add it all up, along with the premature commitment to Kyrou and the big immovable deals to aging defensemen, and you have a retooling mess of Armstrong’s making.
Craig Berube paid the price.