The St. Louis Blues’ season has fallen well short of expectations, and Doug Armstrong isn’t shying away from that reality.
Speaking candidly about his team’s position in the standings, the Blues general manager and president offered a blunt assessment of a year that has lacked consistency and direction.
“Obviously we’re embarrassed for where we’re at in the standings,” Armstrong told Corey Miller of KSDK News in a video posted Wednesday. “It’s been a really poor year.”
The Blues sit at the bottom of the Central Division and second-last in the Western Conference with a 19-25-9 record, going 2-7-1 over their last 10 games.
St. Louis was looking to build off a season in which it finished as the second wild-card team in the West and pushed the Winnipeg Jets to seven games, but it has gone in the opposite direction.
Armstrong pointed to the opening week of the season as a brief moment of optimism. After an underwhelming performance that still resulted in a win in Calgary, the Blues followed it up with what he described as an “excellent game” in Vancouver — a performance he believed could serve as a starting point.
“I thought that would be the start of something that we could build off of,” Armstrong said. “And it hasn’t gone that way.”
Rather than building momentum, the Blues have struggled to find consistency from night to night.
As Armstrong explained, the underlying issue goes beyond individual games or stretches of poor results.
“The disappointing part is we don’t have a foundation that we fall back on on any given night,” he said. “We don’t have an identity that we play to.
“Every night it seems to be something different. Until we find something that has a solid foundation — that this is who we are, this is what we go back to — we’re going to continue to have these games where it’s something different every night.”
The team will be looking to make changes with the trade deadline approaching, with Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman suggesting that Robert Thomas could be available if the team is blown away by an offer.
The NHL's trade freeze for the Olympics starts on Feb. 4 and runs until Feb. 22, with Armstrong heading over to Milan-Cortina with Team Canada.
Last month, Armstrong told The Athletic that he has no desire to move off players just for the sake of making a trade.
“We’re not selling 50 cents on the dollar out of anger,” he said. “We’re not considering trading players less than the value we think that they’re worth.”
The trade deadline for the NHL is on March 6.
