Needless to say, Doug Armstrong was giddy Monday morning.
And why wouldn't he be?
The St. Louis Blues general manager had just completed a two-week plus trip to Sweden to take in the Blues prospects at the 2024 IIHF World Junior Championship and came away quite impressed.
The seven Blues prospects (Jimmy Snuggerud, Dalibor Dvorsky, Theo Lindstein, Otto Stenberg, Juraj Pekarcik, Jakub Stancl and Aleksanteri Kaskimaki) all performed at a high level, combining for 44 points (22 goals, 22 assists) and coming away with a gold medal (Snuggerud, USA), silver (Stenberg/Lindstein, Sweden) and bronze (Stancl, Czechia).
"Obviously we were very impressed as an organization, happy for the players," Armstrong said. "Having seven players there was a feather in the amateur staff's cap and how they performed; not only the first-year players but all seven players. All produced offense, all were good 200-foot players. As an organization, we've got a gold, a silver and a bronze to show for it, so it was a great two weeks for us."
Armstrong was able to see all seven live.
"Yeah. Obviously getting the guys to the semifinals and the bronze medal game was good, but we got a chance to see everybody and just very impressed by their overall game," Armstrong said. "The offensive production from the players that we were hoping for was really good."
Before Blues fans get too giddy about any of these guys making the jump to the NHL yesterday, keep things in perspective that they were competing against their own peers, and Armstrong has said in the past that unless you're a Connor Bedard, not to get too jumpy too soon. It won't change the long-term outlook.
"They don't really," Armstrong said. "I think that when we went down that path last year, and I think we were pretty consistent that we weren't hoping to go down that path a year ago, we were hoping to have a much better team than we had but it expedited our process and having five players from one draft, it gets us excited. What you don't want to do, there's a feeling that sometimes the players fail the teams and sometimes the teams fail the players. What I mean by that is if you put them in positions not to succeed and expectations (are) too high, what we want to do is build this foundationally and not build it on a house of cards and not want to put them in the NHL too early and have them fail, so we were telling people, 'We're a young team, look at us, we've got all these young players,' but if they're not getting better or they can't sustain it. What we want to do is give them a chance to have that long-term good career and to do that building the foundation, they might do it as early as next year but it might be a couple of years. We're not going to try to throw the baby out of the bath water trying to rush people in to situations that don't give these players the best for the organization moving forward."
What this does do is put the Blues in a position come trade deadline in the near future and down the road too, that they are in a position of strength when it comes to dealing, for now or for the future.
"I always find you find the value of your prospects at the trade deadline," Armstrong said. "Let's say if we were sitting where Vancouver is at right now or the Rangers or one of those top teams, it wouldn't just be, 'OK, do you want to move that player?' We'd have four or five that they would say, 'OK, how about this guy, how about that guy?' Quite honestly, we haven't been there in a while in this organization probably since I got here in '08. But that's part of the plan that we have and I know the plan, the internal plan is not sexy, it's not something people want to buy. They don't really care how you're going to be in 26-27, but when you build an organization, that's how you have to look at it and that's what we're doing. We do like our foundation though."
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