St. Louis Blues Assign Three Players to Junior Teams

The Blues’ training camp roster is down to 52 players after Wednesday’s cuts.

The St. Louis Blues made another round of cuts on Wednesday, assigning three players to their junior clubs: forwards Jordan Kyrou and Filip Helt, who will join the Sarnia Sting of the OHL, and center Adam Musil, who will return to the Red Deer Rebels of the WHL. Kyrou and Helt were both selections in this summer’s draft, with Kyrou going in the second round and Helt in the seventh, while Musil was a fourth-round selection in last year’s draft.

This will be the 18-year-old Helt’s first season in North America after spending all of his career to date in his native Czech Republic. The decision to come to America and play junior hockey has previously been successful for young Blues forwards Dmitrij Jaskin and Ivan Barbashev. Kyrou, meanwhile, will be entering his third season with Sarnia, and he’ll attempt to build off a 2015-16 campaign during which he scored 17 goals and added 34 assists in 65 games.

Musil, a 6-foot-3, 200-pound 19-year-old, will spend a fifth season with Red Deer. He had a career-best 43 points last season, collecting 19 goals and 24 assists in 66 games.

Musil and Kyrou, both of whom signed entry-level contracts with the Blues this offseason, played in the road end of the club’s split-squad preseason opener in Columbus. Associate head coach Mike Yeo, who ran the bench for that game, praised their performance. Yeo presumably will be Musil and Kyrou’s head coach if they make it to the NHL with the Blues, as he was named the head coach in waiting back in June.

Next: Blues to Utilize Berglund, Jaskin at Center

The Blues’ training camp roster now stands at 52 players (though the team continues to count Vladimir Sobotka, who practiced with Avangard Omsk of the KHL on Wednesday, as part of their roster, so they’re saying 53).