What to Make of St. Louis Blues Trying Out Paul Bissonnette?
The St. Louis Blues announced on Tuesday that they’ve decided to bring veteran forward Paul Bissonnette in for a tryout in training camp. For those who aren’t close followers of the NHL, this means that Bissonnette is eligible to participate in the team’s training camp and preseason games, but the Blues can cut ties with him at the end of the preseason and have no consequences for doing so. If they want to keep him, all they have to do is offer him an official contract. While it can never hurt to bring in extra bodies for camp, the move is somewhat puzzling.
The 29-year-old Bissonnette, who has spent nearly all of his career with the Phoenix Coyotes, has made his mark in the NHL as a situational enforcer, never playing in more than 48 games in a season despite not having played in the minors since 2008-09. He doesn’t create offense, having only seven goals and 15 assists over 202 NHL games, but he can get under the opponent’s skin and amassed 117 penalty minutes back in 2009-10.
With that skill set, Bissonnette would seem to be trying to fill the roles that guys like Maxim Lapierre, Steve Ott, and Ryan Reaves currently occupy. All of those players (particularly the latter two) have contracts that pretty much lock them into regular roles on the team, though, plus Bissonnette is not going to take face-offs like Lapierre and Ott are capable of doing.
It’s very possible that the Blues just want to continue to collect as much experienced forward depth as possible with young winger Jaden Schwartz still unsigned for the 2014-15 season. They’ve already added NHL vets Peter Mueller and Colin Fraser in recent weeks, and Bissonnette is another guy that they can take a flyer on and see if there’s any chance of him making an impact. Bissonnette himself acknowledged that it will be a tough battle to find a spot, saying, “I know I have to come in and make a team, and I don’t even know if there are any spots available. But I have to showcase and try to make a team.”
The Blues have a history of making these types of moves, though none of them recently have resulted in any success. They brought veteran defenseman Ryan Whitney in for a preseason tryout last season, and in the camp before that another experienced defenseman, Colin White, was brought in under the same circumstances, but in both cases the players were released before the start of the regular season.
The presence of Bissonnette, and particularly the increased desire to evaluate him in games due to his status as a tryout player, could be somewhat detrimental to the Blues if it comes at the expense of getting other organizational players preseason game experience. But if the Blues can strike lightning with the veteran forward, then it will certainly be worth it.