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 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 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.
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