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The Blues had a very rough regular season with many ups and downs. They made a few moves throughout the season bringing in players such as Hamilton, Enstrom, Eriksson, Sturm. The chatter around the Blues is that Enstrom, Eriksson and Sturm will not be resigned and the Blues will look to UFA to fill those spots or maybe some of the AHL players will put up a good fight to earn some of those spots. The team will have a big hole to fill with Marion Gaborik saying he will test the market but the Blues traded him away to Tampa Bay for Connor Rankin, Cole Ully and Mathieu Carle . They also brought in a couple of hard hitting defensemen in Mark Fistic and Anton Babchuk. The Blues will be looking closely at the list of UFAs that are going to be available and see who can fill the void that Gaborik will leave behind. They are hoping that Ryan Callahan might be able to fill some of the void left from Gaborik, but that remains to be seen.
The playoffs have not been very nice for the Blues in the past years. But this past year they pushed and pushed their way through teams that they had no business beating. That brought them to the Stanley Cup Finals against the Pittsburgh Penguins. They gave it all they could against the Pens but they just couldnt do it. The Blues had the most wins against the Pens in the playoffs but that wasnt good enough in the end. So the Blues are going to load up and give it another try and hopefully they will be able to pull off a Stanley Cup Win this coming season. But before that can happen, some players like Brayden Schenn, Lars Eller, Alex Steen, Chris Kunitz had better start putting up some better numbers or they could be trade bait.
So we will see what the UFA period brings for the Blues and see what kind of team they can put together after such a hard fought playoff run.
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The Blues have made a couple of recent deals.The biggest one is perhaps signing UFA Derick Brassard. Brassard should bring in alot of experience and his very skillful playmaking to the mix of an already lethal Blues offense. othe deals include sending Ryan Callahan to the Flyers for young gun Max Friberg. And also Brayden Schenn was sent packing for Zach Hamill, Julius Junttila and a Flyers 5th rounder. They also traded away Dougie Hamilton and John McFarland in return for veteran blueliner Jay Bouwmeester , young emerging star Joe Basaraba , and high end prospect Frederik Gauthier. For leadership and more veteran presence the Blues got Daniel Sedin, young blueliner blue chip spec Ryan Murphy and a Vancouver 3rd for Dan Hamhuis. So hopefully these deals can help fill whatever hole it was that stopped the Blues from winning the cup against the Pens last season and gives them a good push towards winning their first ever cup in EHEC.
