The St. Louis Blues almost blew it up. Seriously. Their amazing run to the Stanley Cup last season was a worst-to-first story, lest we forget, and they opened the 2019 calendar year 31 overall in the league standings, so it was only natural that GM Doug Armstrong considered cashing out. Whether that meant Alex Pietrangelo or Vladimir Tarasenko or someone else was close to changing addresses, we’ll never know, but Armstrong explained to my colleague Ken Campbell in a recent issue of The Hockey News magazine that the Blues were pushed to the brink of nuking the roster.
They didn’t, of course.