NHL Rumors: St. Louis Blues, and Retaining Your Own Free Agents

The St. Louis Blues could send the trade market into a frenzy if they want to be aggressive

Marco D’Amico of RG Media: The St. Louis Blues have a young forward group, an aging blue line, and are somewhere between a retool and rebuild. They’ve adjusted their core as they try to remain relevant, but they could turn into sellers and shake up the trade market if they wanted to be aggressive.

“Brayden Schenn could be made available should they continue this way and many teams will be interested, but I wonder about Jordan Kyrou, Colton Parayko, and Robert Thomas,” speculated the source. “Are they going to want to undergo a retool or potential rebuild? That’s going to create some noise, maybe not immediately, but closer to the trade deadline, if the Blues remain a bottom-feeding team in the standings.”

More teams are keeping their own players and not letting them get to free agency

Mike Zeisberger of NHL.com: Columbus Blue Jackets GM Don Waddell on more teams keeping their own pending free agents, especially with the number of potential players going to the open market on July 1st decreasing.

“As for the lack of player movement around the League, if you go back and look at the transactions this summer, I haven’t counted them, but it’s by far the least amount of transactions we’ve had in probably 15 years,” Waddell said. “And a lot of it has to do with there not being a lot of top-end free agents on the market, of course, because of the cap going up, and people are finding a way to keep their own players.

“If you go back the last five, six years, every summer there’s been three or four teams that had to make moves to get under the cap in the summer. But after free agency started this summer, there wasn’t anybody in cap jail that had to make moves. So I just think going forward, free agency is not going to be like it used to be.”