Blues to pursue top remaining UFA forwards

 The St. Louis Blues announced yesterday that veteran forward Alex Steen will miss the upcoming season due to a back injury. It seems every dark cloud has it's silver lining for the Blues, St. Louis will save $5.75 million in cap space for the upcoming year. The space is badly needed for the Blues, who were $1.2 million over the cap before the Steen announcement and still have RFA defender Vince Dunn to sign. 

The Blues will no doubt use the savings to re-sign Dunn, but it may also be used to plug some holes in their forward group. Matt Larkin of The Hockey News believes the Blues will use the cap relief to add a scoring winger. Names like Mike Hoffman, Erik Haula, Mikael Granlund and Andreas Athanasiou were all mentioned as possibilities. Erik Haula was also mentioned by NBC Sports' Adam Gretz as being on the Blues radar. 

There is still no official start date for the season, but players are returning to their cities and hopefully we will be watching hockey in a couple weeks. Could the 2021 season be even crazier than 2020? All bets are off heading into next year, should be fun. 

photo credit: Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire