St. Louis Finished Its Off-Season Work in July and Has Been Waiting Since
St. Louis Blues 2026-27 outlook covers GM Alexander Steen's trades and free agent signings, highlighting the excitement for the upcoming season.
The St. Louis Blues have spent five weeks doing nothing, and according to The Hockey News that is precisely the problem with how their summer went.
Ryan Lambert’s piece on the club framed it plainly: new general manager Alexander Steen worked multiple trades ahead of the draft and signed a few free agents to round out the roster, and getting all your work done by mid-July means a lot of waiting around and wondering whether the team has done enough.
The position the club is actually in
Lambert’s description of where St. Louis has been is the more useful part. The Blues have not been good enough to contend and not bad enough to tank, the least productive place in a salary-cap league to spend consecutive seasons.
They have made the playoffs once in the last five years, and the 109-point season in 2021-22 is now far enough back to function as a benchmark rather than a recent memory. Making the postseason in 2026-27 would be the second time in five years.
Robert Thomas is the case for optimism
The number Lambert leads with on the roster is Robert Thomas’s production: 373 points in his last 361 games, which is 31st in the league across that stretch. Thomas has never scored more than 26 goals in a season, but he has held roughly a point-per-game pace for several years.
Lambert’s own framing is that this is very good and also not sufficient on its own: his phrasing is that you are not going to make the playoffs these days if your leading producer is carrying the load alone. A first-line centre at that rate is a foundation. The question is what is behind him, and that is where the summer’s mid-July finish starts to matter.
Why an early finish is a strategic choice, not a failure
There is a defensible version of what Steen did. Free agency prices peak on July 1 and decline through the month; a general manager who fills his holes early at reasonable numbers has avoided the August market, where the available players are available for reasons.
There is also the calendar. The collective bargaining agreement takes effect Sept. 16 and cuts maximum contract length (eight years to seven for a club’s own player, seven to six for an outside signing), so anything St. Louis still wanted to do at maximum term had to happen before Sept. 15. Finishing early means that deadline is not a factor.
The betting frame
The market does not share the case for optimism. St. Louis is quoted in the +10000 to +25000 range on the Stanley Cup board, which places the Blues among the clubs a book has no interest in holding a detailed opinion about.
An 84-game season, the longest since 1993-94, with 42 home and 42 road games and two extra divisional dates, is a slightly better environment for a middling team than an 82-game one, because divisional games produce more three-point outcomes. That is worth something. It is not worth the distance between a wild card and where the board currently has them.
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