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St. Louis Blues Fire Craig Berube

St. Louis Blues Fire Craig Berube

The St. Louis Blues have made a surprising coaching change. The team has announced that head coach Craig Berube has been relieved of his duties. In addition, Drew Bannister, the head coach of their AHL affiliate, the Springfield Thunderbirds, has been named the interim bench boss in St. Louis.

A veteran of over 1,000 games as a player, Berube is best known for the magical run he led the Blues on after taking over in a mid-season coaching change in 2018-19. With the Blues struggling to find any sort of success under Mike Yeo, general manager Doug Armstrong made a coaching change and placed control over the team in Berube’s hands.

That decision paid almost immediate dividends. The Blues went on a scorching-hot run to close out the regular season and then won their franchise’s first Stanley Cup in dramatic fashion: a dominant game-seven road victory against a strong Boston Bruins team.

Berube’s leadership led the Blues to the Stanley Cup championship that had eluded them for so long. For that, he’ll always be remembered as a legend in St. Louis.

That being said, since that Stanley Cup run the Blues have been on an undeniable decline. They lost in the first round in consecutive years following the championship, and then rebounded in 2021-22 and won one playoff series. But a 37-38-7 record last season exposed some serious cracks in the Blues’ foundation, and a middling 13-14-1 start to this campaign was the final nail in the coffin for Berube.

It’s fair to question whether the decline of the Blues is ultimately down to Berube’s coaching, or personnel decisions made by the front office. On one hand, the Blues have an undeniably talented team, they spend to the salary cap, and should probably be performing better than they are right now just assessing things on paper.

But on the other hand, there have been some definite missteps from the front office. First and foremost, the team has seemingly not recovered from captain Alex Pietrangelo’s decision to leave and sign with the Vegas Golden Knights.

Additionally, players such as Torey Krug, Nick Leddy, Marco Scandella, Kasperi Kapanen, Jakub Vrána are all not providing surplus value for their cap hits, which has clogged up the team’s financial flexibility to make changes. The large number of players with some form of no-trade protection in their contracts has also cost the team the ability to make meaningful changes to its roster.

That’s not to say all the moves since the Stanley Cup win have…

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