Blues Thought Ahead with Coaching Change

It was a little bit surprising when the St. Louis Blues fired coach Davis Payne earlier this month. The Blues were 6-7. Not great, but certainly not horrible. It was even more surprisingly when GM Doug Armstrong hired Ken Hitchcock as the new coach, since the rumors had Hitchcock taking over in Columbus. Armstrong obviously didn’t have much faith in Payne, but he also gave the St. Louis Post-Dispatch an interesting reason for the Hitchcock import: The reality is, this is a business and we have a number of players that are going to want huge economic rewards over the next 18 months and we need to know what we have in these players. You want to make wise investments and I thought having an experienced coach would give us a better opportunity to know exactly what we had. In other words, Armstrong felt Davis wasn’t doing enough of a job kicking the tires of guys like TJ Oshie, Chris Stewart, Carlo Colaiacovo, Alex Pietrangelo, and Patrik Berglund, none of whom are under ...