The most hyped NHL Draft in years, headlined by one of the most hyped players in years, had its Draft Lottery on Monday night. The winner would get the right to draft Connor Bedard first overall next month and potentially change the direction of their franchise for years. General managers were all-out tanking for this pick, to give some context as to how valued it was.

There were a couple changes at the top, but it was the Chicago Blackhawks that improved in the most important way by landing the first overall pick at the drawing. All of Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Alex DeBrincat, Kirby Dach, Sam Lafferty, and Dylan Strome were all moved in the last year, prepping for the next era of the franchise, which will now be heralded by Bedard.

It was a blatant tank job from the summer onward and it worked. A first overall pick does not guarantee deep playoff runs but their rebuild just got supercharged. Lukas Reichel is probably a happy guy at the moment.

For more on Bedard and the rest of the top prospects, the Dobber Prospects team released their rankings of the top-64 incoming players a few weeks ago.

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Vegas took a 2-1 series lead over Edmonton on Monday night thanks to a 5-1 win in Alberta. Jack Eichel had a goal and two assists, with a couple of those points coming off beautiful plays, while Jonathan Marchessault scored twice. Eichel is now up to 10 points in eight playoff games, and it's really weird that all his loudest critics over the years have completely shut their mouths over the last month. Not sure what happened there.

Chandler Stephenson and Zach Whitecloud also tallied in the victory.

The big news was Vegas goalie Laurent Brossoit leaving the game in the first period due to what appeared to be a right leg injury suffered on a sliding save. He did not return, and things looked bad. Adin Hill stepped in and saved all 24 shots he faced, so he looks very ready to take over in net after the unfortunate injury to Brossoit.

This was the first time the Edmonton depth truly struggled hard in this series, so it'll be interesting to see how they rebound in Game 4, which goes Wednesday night in Edmonton. It was also the first time in the playoffs both Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl were held pointless in the same game.

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The offseason fantasy review of each of the non-playoff teams continues today. This series just goes over the teams that missed the postseason, to try to give one last brief analysis before we turn the page to the Draft/free agency. Today, we head back to the Western Conference and discuss one of the more recent Stanley Cup winners in the St. Louis Blues.

This review will cover player successes/failures, team improvements/declines, as well as where the Blues go from here. For a roster that saw so much turnover, there is no shortage of discussion points. All of this will be through a fantasy hockey lens.

As usual, the data will be taken from our Frozen Tools or Natural Stat Trick, unless otherwise indicated.

Successes

Exactly how much of a success Jordan Kyrou's fantasy season was depends on the inclusion (or not) of plus/minus in a fantasy league. Kyrou exploded to 37 goals (27 last season), 272 shots (188 last season), and finished with 23 power-play points out of 73 total. That is great, but he also finished a minus-38, and that was dead last in the NHL among all forwards. In leagues with plus/minus, it was a huge, huge drag on his value. Despite that, though, he out-performed his Yahoo! Fantasy ADP, which was somewhere around pick 90-100, by finishing inside the top-80. Not a monster performance, but when considering that plus/minus, it feels like a miracle.

Kyrou finished the year in the 93^rd percentile in shot rate both at 5-on-5 and at all strengths. He finished as a mid-tier top-line scoring winger, which feels about right for him. He is a guy that we will discuss more this summer.

Brayden Schenn just keeps producing, too. He had 44 assists in 2022-23, a career-best, which helped him to 65 points, the second-highest mark of his career. He kept up his solid hit rates, too, so we can chalk up another good roto season for Schenn, though he's another guy whose plus/minus had a big impact on his fantasy value. We should note his hits per game have declined in back-to-back seasons from 2.1 per game in Bubble 2021 to 1.9 last season and 1.7 this past campaign. Still very good, but declining, and he turns 32 years old this summer.

Quietly, Justin Faulk put up an excellent roto season with 11 goals, 39 assists (career high), 50 points (career high), 196 shots, 140 blocks (career high), and 112 hits. He finished as a top-20 defenceman on Yahoo!, and that's with the third-lowest PPP total (10) of anyone in that top-20 (Devon Toews had seven PPPs while Darnell Nurse had one).

We'll touch on Jakub Vrana here. He was sent to St. Louis after a turbulent time in Detroit, including a few months in the Player Assistance Program. He played just 20 games for the Blues, but put up 10 goals in those games, once again showing the elite goal scoring that made him a coveted young star. It could be a huge deal in the fantasy game moving forward if he can be that guy again, but a feature role, and the ice time that comes with it, are ongoing concerns.

Failures

This will exclude guys that were moved like Ryan O'Reilly, Vladimir Tarasenko, and Ivan Barbashev. None of them were having a good year in St. Louis – Barbashev was fine banger leagues – and it looks like they'll all be elsewhere in 2023-24 anyway.

We can't really slag Pavel Buchnevich here. He missed 19 games and seemed to be playing injured at times. That kept him from being a fantasy success, but he did have 67 points in 63 games as he continued his very good production since being shipped from New York. A failure due to injury, but a 75-game season in 2023-24 should produce another good fantasy campaign.

A 65-point season from Robert Thomas, in 73 games played, isn't a bad year. However, a drop in goals, assists, and shots per game from 2021-22, despite adding over 30 seconds per game in TOI, is not ideal. He also had the lowest 5-on-5 shot rate of any forward with at least 850 minutes played this season, and there were 219 of them. He doesn't need to be a volume shooter, but pacing for 120 shots in an 82-game season, on top of the lack of blocks/hits, is a huge hurdle for him to overcome and really be valuable in multi-cat formats. If he posts 20-goal, 60-assists, 120-shot, 25-hit seasons, it really doesn't bring a lot to the table. Not in a higher-scoring NHL environment. We need more shots here in the future for true fantasy relevance.

Torey Krug missed 19 games as well but posted just 32 points in his 63 contests. His goals, assists, points, and shots per game were below his career averages, while those were also all declines from what he did in 2021-22 with the shots portion excepted. His points-per-minute at 5-on-5 also dropped from 2021-22 as the team scored much less frequently with him on the ice. Krug turned 32 years old a couple weeks ago and lost nearly two minutes per game in TOI compared to last season. It is really fair to wonder what his future fantasy value holds, because it could be considerably less than just two years ago, especially if Scott Perunovich can take a leap forward (and stay healthy) as the team, and dynasty owners, are hoping.  

The goaltenders should probably be mentioned. Every Blues goalie finished with a negative Goals Saved Above Expected, per Evolving Hockey. By this measure, Binnington now ranks worse than Jonathan Quick, James Reimer, and Sergei Bobrovsky, on a per-minute basis, over the last three seasons.

Improvements

None.

Declines

At the risk of sounding glib, there really weren't any improvements, at the team level, for St. Louis:

• When they were 5-on-5, compared to 2021-22, the Blues saw team-wide declines in goal share, shot share, shot attempt share, expected goal share, goals-for per minute, team shooting percentage, and team save percentage. They also saw a rise in goals against.
• When they were on the power play, compared to 2021-22, the Blues saw team-wide declines in goal share, shot share, shot attempt share, expected goal share, goals-for per minute, team shooting percentage, and team save percentage. They also saw a rise in goals against.
• When they were on the penalty kill, compared to 2021-22, the Blues saw team-wide declines in goal share, shot share, shot attempt share, goals-for per minute, and team save percentage. They also saw a rise in goals against.

Between goal share, shot share, shot attempt share, expected goal share, goals-for per minute, goals-against per minute, team save percentage, and team shooting percentage, at each of 5-on-5/PP/PK, there was one (1) improvement: short-handed team shooting percentage. Everything else declined. That is 24 important team sub-categories with one (1) improvement. So, yeah, no real improvements, and that's what makes this team so interesting.

Where Do They Go From Here

This is a most interesting question for this franchise. There are a lot of good, young players around with long-term contracts like Kyrou and Thomas, per Cap Friendly. Buchnevich is a full-fledged top-line forward and has two years left. Brandon Saad is still a solid middle-6 winger with a few years left. Colton Parayko's offence has fallen on hard times but he's still good defensively. There are still a handful of good players here for at least one more year, and most for many after that.

At the same time, there are a lot of bad contracts here. If Krug is falling off – I'll look into that more this summer – that is a $6.5M cap hit on the team's third defence pair. Nick Leddy isn't horrific or anything, and a second-pair guy for $4M isn't awful, but it's not great. There is also Schenn making $6.5M until 2028. He is still very good for fantasy purposes, at least for now, but he's a divisive real-life player. Public metrics don't capture everything a player does defensively, but it's hard to say he's a good defensive player when this is where opposing teams shoot from most often when he's on the ice (from HockeyViz):

It was more or less the same in 2021-22, so how good he is now defensively seems less of a question of is/isn't rather than a degree of how bad.

Though St. Louis doesn't have much cap space for the offseason – under $7M – they also just have Alexey Toropchenko and Logan Brown as RFAs with Josh Leivo, Thomas Greiss, and Tyler Pitlick as UFAs. In other words, they might extend their own guys, but just brining those guys back on cheap deals (with Joel Hofer in net) could see the team with roughly $4.5M in cap space, and that alone can mean an impactful free-agent signing if they want to try to get back to the postseason.

The question is whether it's prudent to go for another kick at the can or roll the roster over and start rebuilding around Thomas/Kyrou. The problem with rolling the roster over is that outside of the young duo, the Blues have Schenn, Saad, Faulk, Krug, Parayko, Leddy, and Binnington all under contract for at least three more years. That is over $40M a season tied up for at least three more years, not including Thomas, Kyrou, and Buchnevich. Add those guys, and the team has over $62M committed 10 players for each of the next two seasons. With all that money tied up for so long, just how much they can roll the roster over in the next couple years to try and build around Thomas/Kyrou is very much in question. For that reason, it seems more likely (and reasonable) for them to try to fill out the roster as best they can before really starting the rebuild in 2025 or 2026.

With largely the same roster returning, there should still be fantasy goodness for the high-end forwards, but everyone else's value is fluid. It is a wonder if they can keep playing the same way they had been the last few years with O'Reilly, Tarasenko, Perron, and Barbashev around.  

Previous Offseason Reviews:

Buffalo

Calgary

Pittsburgh

Nashville

Ottawa

Vancouver

Detroit