St. Louis Blues Prospects: Who’s Hot, Who’s Not

Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports

Now that the St. Louis Blues are about six weeks into the season, it’s a good time to check in with the Blues’ developmental system and see which young players are off to good starts thus far. Though a large chunk of the truly impactful players the Blues have recently drafted are already in the NHL (i.e. Colton Parayko, Robby Fabbri, Dmitrij Jaskin, etc.), there’s still a fair amount of intrigue at the various levels of the minor leagues.

It’s fair to assume that we’ve already seen most of the players who have a chance of contributing to the NHL club in 2015-16 don a Blues uniform during the early going, as injuries to Paul Stastny, Jaden Schwartz, Patrik Berglund, and Kevin Shattenkirk have necessitated the usage of 25 different skaters through 15 games. It’s difficult to see things getting a whole lot worse on the injury front going forward, and the Blues will likely have an excess of NHL talent sooner than they’ll need to bring too many more players up from the minors. Even if more injuries were to occur, it’s no sure thing that players from the Blues’ system would be brought up, as was evidenced by the Blues’ recent signing of veteran forward Martin Havlat and the demotion of Ty Rattie, who is a highly-regarded prospect in some circles, to the minors.

Here we’ll take a look at some Blues prospects who have gotten off to both really good and noticeably lacking starts so far. Fair warning: the hot list is much longer than the cold one, as the Blues’ AHL affiliate, the Chicago Wolves, are off to their best start in franchise history at 7-1-1. In addition, many of the Blues’ younger prospects are thriving at the major junior level, so it was difficult to highlight a few who need to step up their play going forward.

Without further ado, here are our hot and cold Blues prospects through the first month-and-a-half of the season.

Next: Who's Hot?