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, winning 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 a team with some genuinely talented players, they spend to the salary cap, and should probably be performing a little bit 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 not paid off, the Pavel Buchnevich trade in particular was absolutely stellar, but overall there have been quite a few missteps in terms of player recruitment and evaluation since the team’s championship win.
So with a squad clearly in need of a change, but without the means to make any significant player moves, the Blues found themselves in a similar predicament to the Edmonton Oilers from earlier this season. Like in Edmonton, it’s unclear how much blame for their current struggles truly lies in the hands of the head coach. But also like in Edmonton, the Blues didn’t have many levers to pull – outside of a coaching change – to try to catalyze team-wide improvement.
The Oilers have responded extremely positively to their coaching change, and have now won eight straight games. The Blues are likely hoping this move produces similar results, and it’s that desperate need for improvement that has led to St. Louis dispatching a figure who accomplished so much for their franchise. They’ve even gone a similar route in terms of replacement to the Oilers. Edmonton hired an AHL head coach from outside of its organization to replace the coach they fired, while the Blues have also opted for an AHL coach, only this one comes from their own AHL affiliate.
Bannister, 49, began his coaching career in the United Kingdom, serving as a player-coach for the Hull Stingrays and Braehead Clan. He got his first chance as a full-time head coach with the OHL’s Owen Sound Attack, reaching the playoffs in each of his three seasons there. He was then hired to his old OHL stomping grounds to be the head coach of the Soo Greyhounds, the junior team he won two OHL titles and a Memorial Cup with as a player. He had a strong tenure with the Greyhounds, leading them to the OHL Finals in 2017-18.
After losing in the OHL Final, Bannister became the head coach of the San Antonio Rampage in the AHL, beginning his AHL coaching career. He did not have a huge amount of success in San Antonio, though things would change after the Blues’ AHL affiliation shifted to Springfield. In his first season in Massachusetts, Bannister coached the Thunderbirds to the Calder Cup Final.
A few key player departures dropped the team to more of a middle-of-the-pack squad last season, but this year Bannister’s Thunderbirds are firmly in the playoff picture with a 12-8-2 record. Bannister has delivered numerous NHL players to St. Louis, such as Jordan Kyrou, Niko Mikkola, Ville Husso, and Jake Walman, to name a few. Now, he’ll be tasked with delivering something different to the Blues: NHL victories.
Photos courtesy of USA Today Sports Images
Doug Armstrong has made poor personnel decisions over the past few seasons. That is the biggest reason the Blues are struggling. He should’ve been the first one to go
Yeah. I’ll take scapegoat for 100 Alex.
Total Panic move.
Never mind what Ethan left out:
2019: Binnington is lights out, with Hart and Vezina votes, the Calder runner-up. Think they’d have beaten Boston with Jake Allen in net?
2020-21: Binnington plays well enough, but is allowing nearly a goal more per game.
Ever Since: Binnington plays bleh.
The Blues aren’t lighting anything on fire offensively, but they didn’t in 2019 either, when only three players reached 20+ goals, and the team was 17th in GF. I like Drew Bannister just fine, but I agree this is just scapegoating.
The other thing he left out is Edmonton has McDavid and Draisaitl and St. Louis has who Thomas? I’m not really seeing a parallel here. This is the GM trying to save face by shifting the blame down the road plain and simple. The Blues have 7 PP goals all year. They’ve scored 8 SH goals. If you don’t have the players that can score with an extra man, How do you see them becoming Edmonton all the sudden? Especially with an AHL coach. Yeah right.
If you look at the Blues you see they have a lot of older guys making a lot of money for a long time. Not the coaches fault.
What a long wind bag article. You lost me at talented roster. You guys should have just stuck to rumors. Your analysis sucks every single time.
Stick to baseball ya twink
Keep clicking, reading and posting. That’ll show ’em!
Seems like the coaching scapegoat.. He’ll land somewhere….Blues need player change..guess this is the first move.. also motivation!!!
Yes, the team is as good as it’s ever been, Berube simply forgot how to coach.
Oh wait, that roster is junk and Binnington turned back into a pumpkin.
Booo… berube will be better off for it. He needs a roster that can contend. The failures of this team fall squarely on Army ever since the cup run.
Edmundson for Faulk ($6.5 x 7)
Loses Petro over a NMC
Loses Dunn for nothing in expansion
Signs Krug for $6.5 x 7
Fabbri for (I forgot the guys name)
Walkman for Leddy ($4 x 4)
Army put this team into a rebuild that he won’t commit to and closed the championship window.
Fabbri to Detroit for Jacob de la Rose, who spent minimal time in STL (contributing little to nothing) before returning to Sweden.
This is Army’s fault not Chief’s fault.
Doug Armstrong has made one terrible decision after another since 2019 Stanley Cup
Chief’s voice got old in that room? The roster construction is Army’s doing, along with their scouts. Did they involve Chief in any personnel decisions? Who knows. If I were Army, I’d be contacting RE/MAX, “just in case.”
If you think the Blues should be around .500 right now raise your hand. I’ll wait. Berube should be coach of the year for getting that far.
if anyone should’ve gone it should’ve been army, he’s the reason we’re in this cap hell, tried to lock up our defense which just backfired and now we probably won’t even have enough to lock up our most valuable player (buchnevich) at the current moment after his contract, and so the cycle repeats itself.
The hard cap requires a smart GM. Talent evaluation is the key, you can’t over value your guys over what is available, when you do you have the situation the Blues are now in.
The addition of krug was heinous. His claim to fame was making a full length run at Thomas in the final. Replaced Petro. Nuts.
For the record, Krug was a good powerplay captain for Boston, multiple time All-Star, got Norris Trophy votes, and was generally well-liked. Not sure if Father Time just caught up with him or what happened when he got to STL, but yeah he has been an albatross for them.
Never liked Krug. The league is littered with these PP QB’s who have no other value (like Tyson Barrie or Marc Andre Bergeron back when) who put up great numbers but are always a net negative presence overall.
Faulk hasn’t been much better, if any.
Leddy was already trailing off when he got to StL, had a good two months and suckered them into yet another bad blueline deal.
And then the goalie soils the bed, too.
But if only Berube did a better job…
MAB nightmares *shudder*
The reason the Blues aren’t good is because of the way the roster has been constructed.
That said, you could argue that they should’ve replaced Berube with Jim Montgomery when they had the chance.
Strange time to do it if it needed to be done at all. This team doesn’t have the personnel to suddenly turn things around and go on a run. Unless they wanted to give Bannister a chance to prove he deserves the job permanently, why not wait until after the season?
Another good coach falls victim to poor decision making by a GM.
Easier to fire a coach than reshape a roster. They currently don’t put enough shots on net to compete. Maybe it’s offensive scheme, but more likely lack of scoring talent.
Flags fly forever. Berube’s work in 2019 is legendary.
Crazy that the Canes and Blues were both in last place on NY’s eve and nearly ended up playing each other in the SCF.
Another omission was the abrupt, yet understandable retirement of Bouwmeester after that scary cardiac arrest on the bench in Anaheim the season after winning the cup and just a month before the pandemic lockdown. The staggering amount of turnover on defense in the brief aftermath of beating my Bruins in Boston is, to me the biggest reason things have been going the way they have since.
I know they play opposite sides and Krug obviously makes less, but there’s a reason for that. Signing Krug and letting Pietrangelo leave is absurd and indefensible.
Were the Blues supposed to be good this season? Certainly not by the roster Armstrong put together. Always the coaches fault though.