The St. Louis Blues have made a surprising move, trading backup goaltender Jake Allen to the Montreal Canadiens.
The St. Louis Blues have started their offseason with a huge bang, sending backup goaltender Jake Allen to the Montreal Canadiens in a surprising move. It caught everyone off guard. In exchange, the Blues are receiving a 2020 3rd round pick (Washington’s) and a 2020 7th round pick (Chicago’s). The Blues are also sending a 2022 7th round pick to Montreal.
This is merely the first of what could be several moves the Blues will make this offseason. Here’s what this trade means for the Blues and what fans can takeaway from this trade that has more to it than meets the eye.
1. Blues Are All In On Binnington
The Blues were going to have to make a tough decision next summer with both Jake Allen and Jordan Binnington hitting the free agent market. They decided to make the decision a year ahead of time by trading Allen.
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It’s clear the Blues are all in on Binnington at this point. They believe he’s ready to be a true number one goalie. Binnington and Allen were a terrific tandem, but they were simply too expensive to keep moving forward, especially with a flat salary cap.
Expect Binnington to see a larger role next season as well. The Blues need to figure out if he’s truly a number one goalie. If they don’t think he is, they have a few options, but all signs point to a Binnington extension at some point in the next 12 or so months.
2. Cap Space
There’s another aspect to this trade – cap space. If there wasn’t a salary cap and there wasn’t a global pandemic doing a number on teams’ finances, the Blues probably wouldn’t have traded Allen. He’s a great backup at a fairly reasonable price. But the Blues had to clear cap space to re-sign Alex Pietrangelo and Vince Dunn.
According to CapFriendly, the Blues have $6.397 million and change of cap space after trading Allen. They retained none of his cap hit or salary, which is a huge help. But it’s going to take way more than that to re-sign Pietrangelo. And even more to keep Pietrangelo and Dunn around.
Trading Allen isn’t enough for the Blues to do what they want to do, but it’s a pretty good start. It’ll be interesting to see what else they do as they try to create enough room to sign both Pietrangelo and Dunn. Ideally, that’s what they’d probably like to do. But it might not be feasible.
3. Who Replaces Allen?
The St. Louis Blues wouldn’t have traded Allen if they didn’t believe Ville Husso was ready to handle a role in the NHL. Husso was drafted in the third round of the 2014 draft and came over to North America in 2017.
Unless the Blues sign another goaltender, he’s slotted to be the backup for next season. I wouldn’t rule them out from doing that. There are more goalies available than starting jobs. Also, every team is dealing with the stagnant salary cap. This could lead to certain goalies being forced to take cheap one-year deals. The Blues could enter that market.
That said, given the uncertainty of the goaltending market, the Blues clearly have faith in Husso to be an NHL backup. If they didn’t, they probably wouldn’t have traded Allen. They would have found another way to create cap space.