New York Rangers: Do the St. Louis Blues have any interesting pieces?

As the St. Louis Blues are in the midst of an absolute free fall, the vultures have begun to circle. Are there any pieces the New York Rangers could make an offer on?

Every single season, one NHL team gets off to a rocky start and its front office and coaching staff go with the kitchen sink approach to try and preserve their own jobs. The St. Louis Blues’ front office already fired head coach Mike Yeo and appointed former Philadelphia Flyer’s head coach Craig Berube. Since then the team has outright disintegrated.

Through 30 games St. Louis has just 26 points and sits in seventh place in the Central Division. At this point, it would take a major turn around for the Blues to get back into the postseason mix. With 52 games to play, there is still ample time to turn it around, however, it’s going to take a major change of the team’s attitude to get there.

The Blues have plenty of roster talent, enough to the point that this slow start got Yeo fired. Featuring stars like Ryan O’Reilly, Vladimir Tarasenko, Alex Pietrangelo and Colton Parayko, St. Louis was a playoff mainstay for most of this decade. Of course, the team always got the short end of the stick and ended up losing to the Chicago Blackhawks in the first round multiple times.

Now, as a rebuilding team, the New York Rangers are not in a position to go giving away future assets all willy nilly. But, if general manager Jeff Gorton and company are doing their due diligence, they will recognize that the Blues need to shake things up and have several pieces that could speed up New York’s rebuild.

In all likelihood, the Rangers are at least two impact players away from being a serious contender again. If the Blues are open for business, there are two pieces that would be worth a serious discussion.

Colton Parayko

Of all the Rangers’ needs, the defense is obviously the most pressing. The team came into camp with a clown car of eight defensemen, with talent ranging from unproven to over the hill. For New York to return to the postseason it will need an impact defenseman capable of playing 22 minutes per night down the stretch in a playoff race.

For a long time, the Blues boasted one of the deepest blue lines in the entire league. At one point, St. Louis featured Alex Pietrangelo, Kevin Shattenkirk, Colton Parayko and Jay Bouwmeester on the back end. That defensive core was as good as any in the entire league, however, as the various defensemen needed raises, the Blues’ front office had to prioritize.

As of now, Pietrangelo and Bouwmeester are no longer the players they once were, Shattenkirk is a Ranger and on injured reserve. This leaves Parayko as the focal point of a Blues’ defense at age 25 and with four years remaining on his contract at a reasonable $5.5 million per season.

Since the Blues traded for O’Reilly last summer, the roster looks considerably thinner and will likely need outside supplementation to try and win with the current core centered around Tarasenko.

Trading Paryko would be a big bullet to bite for a Blues team that expected to compete. However, the bounty the team could receive in exchange for the first pair defenseman would stimulate a quicker rebuild.

Vladimir Tarasenko

Oh, Dylan McIlrath, we hardly knew ye. If it weren’t for Glen Sather thinking he found the second coming of Jeff Beuekeboom back in the 2010 draft, the Rangers would have drafted the Russian forward with the number ten overall pick. Instead, New York took a defenseman who’s played less than 50 games at the NHL level.

It’s painful to say, but if the Rangers selected Tarasenko in 2010, the team probably would have won the Stanley Cup in 2014 with the Russian in the fold on an already talented team. In his 450 NHL games, Tarasenko has posted 187 goals including three seasons of more than 35 goals.

This would be the ultimate white flag move from the Blues’ front office. Trading the team’s best player 30 games into the season tells every other team that St. Louis is kicking the can down the road and will look to compete in three to five year if everything goes well. It’s a difficult decision for a G.M. to make, but one that does become necessary over time.

To preserve one’s own job, the G.M. needs to point to a reason. If the G.M. unloads a franchise talent and picks up a fistful of future assets, they’re able to point to the assets as a reason to stay. It gives the illusion of a plan that does not exist yet serves as the “if you hire me, I’ll tell you my plan,” catch 22 from “The Office.”

Where New York comes in

For New York to pick up either of these Blues’ stars, it would take an arm and a leg. However, if the front office feels it has a viable path forward to compete within the next year or two, this is the type of calculated risk that good executives take. Look at the Buffalo Sabres’ trade for Jeff Skinner this past summer.

The Sabres’ front office saw that the team had a nice group of young players with a handful of veterans who had been around the block. In adding Skinner to an unproven group, it gave the team a shot in the arm that allowed it to get off to a strong start. While the Sabres have struggled as of late, the point still remains.

The Rangers’ front office can take this concept to heart and seriously reflect on what next year is going to look like. It will have moves to make based on the assets the team currently holds and could stand to add either roster players or future assets to the current group.

It’d likely cost two picks, and an A-level prospect to land Parayko and even more for Tarasenko. However, adding either player to the Rangers right now would make the team leaps and bounds better. A first pair defenseman or a legitimate 40 goal scorer on a young team sends a strong message from the front office: We believe in you, go get it done.

The Rangers are in a unique position in that the team could be competitive as soon as next year or take as long as three years to be a contender. It’s up to Gorton to make things happen and give David Quinn the tools to compete.