Across the last two days, the Blues have signed four players from Sweden, including 2023 first-round pick Otto Stenberg on Wednesday. St. Louis also signed forward Simon Robertsson (third-round pick in 2021), forward Marcus Sylvegard (free agent) and defenseman Samuel Johannesson (free agent).
Stenberg, 18, is the headliner of the group, even if his expected arrival in the NHL could be later. The Blues selected Stenberg with the 25th pick (acquired from Toronto in the Ryan O’Reilly trade) last year, and the team has now signed all three of their first-rounders from 2023 after previously inking deals with Dalibor Dvorsky and Theo Lindstein.
Stenberg spent the season with Frolunda HC in the SHL, with three goals and three assists in 31 games. He also spent nine games in the second-tier Allsvenskan, where he was a point-per-game player. When Stenberg played against his peers at the World Junior Championship for Sweden, he had five goals and four assists in seven games.
Stenberg will turn 19 later this month, and his contract is eligible to slide if he plays fewer than 10 games in the NHL. Stenberg’s entry-level contract is for three years.
Robertsson, 21, could be ready to make the jump to North America next season after signing with the Blues. He recently won the SHL championship with Skelleftea AIK, and he had one goal, one assist and 28 penalty minutes in 15 playoff games.
Robertsson was part of Sweden’s World Juniors team in 2022-23, and his entry-level contract is for three years.
Sylvegard and Johannesson were European free agents eligible to sign with any NHL team, and both signed with the Blues as they look to make the jump from Europe to North America. Because of their ages, their entry-level contracts are shorter than the typical three-year one for many prospects.
Sylvegard, who turns 25 on Saturday, is signed for one year, while the 23-year-old Johannesson is signed for two years.
Sylvegard was one of the top scorers in the notoriously hard-to-score SHL last season. In 51 games, he had 23 goals (second in the league) and 41 points (tied for seventh in the league) for Vaxjo Lakers HC. It was his second straight 41-point season in the SHL, as he did it for Malmo Redhawks in 2022-23.
Johannesson was originally a sixth-round pick by Columbus in 2020 but did not sign with the Blue Jackets. A right-handed defenseman, Johannesson is a high-scoring blue liner, as his 27 points last year were eighth in the SHL among defensemen. The previous season, his 32 points were fifth-most among SHL defensemen.
European free agents can be lottery tickets in a sense. If they work out, it’s a great find for NHL teams, but if they don’t, it’s a risk-free flier.
Last year, the Blues signed forward Andre Heim, but he departed North America for Europe before even playing in an AHL game.
With Stenberg, Robertsson, Sylvegard and Johannesson signed, the Blues now have seven Swedes under contract for next season with Lindstein, Leo Loof and Anton Malmstrom also signed.
Pavel Buchnevich has one guarantee from the Blues: There will be discussions about a contract extension.
Blues general manager Doug Armstrong said so after the trade deadline, and he reiterated that point two weeks ago when he spoke to reporters at his year-end news conference.
“We’ll approach him,” Armstrong said. “We’ll approach him. I’m a big Pavel fan. Again, with free agency, it’s a two-way street. He just turned 29 (on April 17). If I was Pavel, I’d want to sit with the manager and talk to him. He’s at the age now where he should ask me hard questions about the direction of this organization because he’s at the age now where I assume winning is going to be very important, and he wants to know how quickly he can win.”
Buchnevich said he would welcome the talks, particularly after a few months of trade rumors around the deadline when he was perhaps one of the top wingers on the market and a desire for other fan bases across the league.
“After this deadline, you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Buchnevich said. “You see rumors, you guys trade me for two months. A little bit stress moment, but deadline done and stress relief. I have a good talk with Doug. He said he’s going to talk to my representative in the summer, and we’ll see how it goes.
“I like it here. After the Rangers trade here, kind of my hockey career changed. Play big minutes, play big role here. This season, not as great as previous ones, but last couple years, previous ones, I think I proved I can be a good player.”
There’s clearly mutual interest on both sides, and Buchnevich is a useful piece for the club, regardless of if he is in St. Louis or elsewhere.
If he remains a Blue, he is a veteran producer who can help transition the team to its next era and potentially remain a top-end player when the prospects are ready to take over the Blues. If he is dealt, he should bring a haul in return, enough to help the Blues restock their cupboards with a mix of NHL talent, prospects or draft picks.
Now, it would just come down to the dollars making sense.
The contract comparables shake out relatively easily for a guy like Buchnevich, who has one year remaining at a $5.8 million cap hit before hitting unrestricted free agency in 2025. He is eligible to sign an extension July 1 of this summer.
Since 2020, there have been 28 forwards who have signed UFA deals worth at least $5.8 million annually . That group runs from Auston Matthews ($13.25 million cap hit) down to Valeri Nichushkin ($6.125 million cap hit) and includes both centers and wingers.
When sorted by career points per game at the time of contract signing, Buchnevich would fall ... exactly in the middle. Buchnevich has 401 points in 517 games, a 0.776 rate that puts him right in between Nashville’s Filip Forsberg (0.829) and Colorado’s Gabriel Landeskog (0.745). There would be 14 players above Buchnevich and 14 players below him.
The average points per game is 0.791, and Buchnevich is the closest of the group to that figure. The average age of the group at signing (not when the contract begins) is 28.8 years old, and Buchnevich just turned 29.
On a purely productive standpoint, Buchnevich is the median player in this group of high earners, but that assumes players are only paid based on points. Scoring is a large driver of salaries, but so is position and role. For instance, the average forward in that 28-player group has a cap hit of $8.455 million. But the centers average $9.027 million a year, while the wingers are at $7.883 million.
Buchnevich, though he has finished each of the past two seasons at center, still profiles long term as a winger, even if the Blues like to use him similarly to a top center. He takes on tough matchups from opposing teams, he’s first on the ice for penalty kills and he’s on the ice defending late leads. He’s taken at least 200 faceoffs each of the past two years.
So then that’s pretty straightforward, right? Buchnevich is the median winger in this group (also seven wingers above and below him), which could put him right around $7.9 million a season? Well, there are still more factors, both on Buchenvich and his agent Todd Diamond’s side and on Armstrong’s side.
One is the salary cap is expected rise this summer. Projections from site CapFriendly place the cap at $87.7 million next season, up from the $83.5 million it was at this season. With more money available, the top players will surely be asking for more total money or a comparable percentage of the cap to the past.
The 14 wingers in that group averaged a contract worth 9.57% of the cap at the time the contract was signed, which would equate to an $8.391 million cap hit for a player like Buchnevich at this time. That would be close to the $8.5 million Forsberg makes in Nashville, and Forsberg has the better counting numbers to command a greater salary.
The issue for the Blues is a salary like that would make Buchnevich the highest-paid player on the team. Did the Blues set an internal cap when they signed Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou to matching contracts worth $8.125 million? It’s something Armstrong clearly has held to in the past. It’s not just Thomas and Kyrou with matching figures. It’s Colton Parayko, Torey Krug and Justin Faulk all with identical $6.5 million cap hits.
After the season Thomas just put together, are the Blues willing to pay someone more money than their franchise player?
“He’s good enough, he’s going to get his money,” Armstrong said of Buchnevich. “I would like him to be here. I have to sell him on why, and then we have to sell each on why we can be comfortably uncomfortable with the financial deal that we make. But I’m a big Pavel fan.”
As far as term goes, the deals for those 28 forwards took them until about 36 years old on average. Some of the ones that extended well past that (like Jonathan Huberdeau, Sean Couturier, Nicklas Backstrom and Nazem Kadri) don’t appear to be aging well. A six-year deal with Buchnevich would take him until he was 36 years old.
So does something like a six-year deal at $8.4 million annually get it done for both sides? Or do the Blues try to hold to an internal cap closer to Thomas’ and Kyrou’s $8.125 million cap hit?
Either way, Buchnevich’s future in St. Louis will likely be determined well before he hits free agency in 2025.
Armstrong’s history is that if a player reaches unrestricted free agency, he will not be back in the Note. Some recent exceptions include Nick Leddy, Tyler Bozak and Scottie Upshall. But there’s a long list of players on the other side, including David Perron, Alex Pietrangelo and Pat Maroon. Plus the different circumstances of Vladimir Tarasenko, Ryan O’Reilly, Ivan Barbashev, Jaden Schwartz, Ville Husso and Niko Mikkola.
Jordan Binnington and Robert Bortuzzo have previously signed extensions during the season with St. Louis.
For Buchnevich, what will be the determining factors for whether he’ll sign an extension with the Blues?
“Lots of things,” Buchnevich said. “I don’t want to go (on) about what’s going to determine it. I like it here, and we will see what’s going to happen.”
The well-researched analysis detailed all the different directions the Blues could go, from running it back with interim Drew Bannister, to betting big on the upside of University of Denver’s 34-year-old sensation David Carle, to trying to wow with proven NHL star power, even if it comes with a dented reputation.
I can’t help but wish there was one more name on the list. It’s the one that has zero percent chance of appearing. The notion will get dismissed because it’s nontraditional and unconventional and would require the Blues to admit that, sometimes, the best way to move forward is to go back.
For the sake of discussion, what if the Blues ended their coaching search by bringing back Craig Berube, the coach they fired before starting this extended coaching search? How would it hit you?
I think many would approve.
Why couldn’t a season that failed to reach the playoffs after Berube was fired combined with some reflection on this team’s direction result in a surprise reunion? Well, because toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube. Only 6 percent of divorced couples, according to Forbes, remarry one another. But you know what the ones who do split and remarry tend to say? They say they appreciate one another more than they did before. Go figure.
Berube is still available despite the hockey hiring rumor mill connecting him to various openings including Ottawa and New Jersey. The Blues are still weighing their options and seem to be in no rush to make a move. If there’s a time to think outside of the box, it’s now. It doesn’t cost anything. Just a little imagination.
The Athletic’s Eric Stephens writes the San Jose Sharks landing Berube would be, “a coup.”
“If the Sabres are looking for a coach who could bring more structure to a young team that is craving it, Berube could be a strong fit,” wrote The Athletic’s Matthew Fairburn before Buffalo hired Lindy Ruff. “That he has a Stanley Cup ring is an added bonus.”
And here was national hockey insider Elliotte Friedman on Friday’s hockey-centric “32 Thoughts” podcast about Ottawa’s reported interest in Chief: “I have people just telling me to watch Craig Berube there. ... I have had a couple teams tell me they think Ottawa really likes Berube.”
The Blues can’t redo the Alex Pietrangelo negotiations. They can’t go back in time and bring back David Perron. Maybe they could get Berube back before another team benefits from his services.
When you fire the only head coach who led you to a Stanley Cup championship in order to try to catch a new-coach bump that produces a playoff appearance, and that playoff appearance doesn’t materialize, and other teams are apparently quite interested in the coach you fired, maybe that’s a sign things should have gone down differently.
When the Blues were the best versions of themselves under Berube, the fit between coach, team and fans became as good as we’ve observed in St. Louis sports in a long time. Had team ownership and leadership remained committed to the coach and his preferred style — a style that shows up in the playoffs every single year for teams that make runs — and prioritized roster changes over the NHL’s predictable path of head-coach ejection, many would have bought what the Blues were selling, even if the team struggled through its transition phase. Players, young or old, who can’t figure out how to give the Blues what Chief asked his players to bring every night are not players to be trusted too much. There is no convincing evidence the Blues played this right.
If Bannister is the Blues’ guy, shouldn’t the Blues know by now? Stressing his status as a finalist while also waiting to vet and interview other candidates after he coached 50-plus games this season feels a bit like telling a significant other to stay patient for a potential engagement while you go on some other blind dates. Bannister is handling it like a pro, but if you go back to him it could be a harder sell now than if you would have just made it official before looking around.
Carle is fascinating. What he’s done in the college realm is crazy impressive. Good coaches are good coaches, period, we have learned while watching great motivators and tacticians climb the ranks in all sports. His hire would be way more refreshing than an NHL retread. Except for one. If the Blues could somehow bring Jim Montgomery back from Boston after the Blues relaunched his career as an assistant, that would be an Armstrong home run.
I disagree with those who have decided Joel Quenneville’s reputation-harming negligence in the Blackhawks’ sexual assault scandal should stop him from coaching again. If he gets cleared by the NHL to return, I think most fans here would welcome him, even though he’s 65 now and has not coached a game since late October 2021. Is there risk in the potential rust? Seems like a fair question, even for the all-time leader in Blues coaching wins.
It was former Blues coach Quenneville who caused years of what-ifs here as he won and won and won in Chicago. It was Berube who finally gave the Blues their own championship and stopped the Quenneville wondering. That makes it a little hard to square the idea of Quenneville, or anyone else, automatically being a better answer for the Blues than Berube. We all saw what Chief can and did do with a roster that was talented enough, tough enough and invested enough.
Maybe years from now Berube will be in the Quenneville zone where the idea of a reunion doesn’t get laughed out of the room. If that’s not hard to imagine, and it isn’t, then isn’t it worth considering right now?