Vladimir Tarasenko Trade Signals Start Of Sell-Off For St. Louis Blues

Four years after he hoisted the Stanley Cup with the St. Louis Blues, Vladimir Tarasenko is on the move to the New York Rangers.

The 31-year-old, who was drafted 16th overall by the Blues in 2010 and requested a trade in 2021, was dealt away on Thursday, along with defenseman Niko Mikkola, in exchange for forward Sammy Blais, defenseman Hunter Skinner and two conditional draft picks.

It’s the second big deal in the last 10 days involving an impending unrestricted free agent. The New York Islanders acquired Bo Horvat from the Vancouver Canucks on Jan. 30 in exchange for two players and a first-round draft pick, then locked him up last Sunday with an eight-year contract extension worth $68 million.

Tarasenko is more than three years older than Horvat, who turns 28 in March. He is in the final season of an eight-year contract extension he signed in St. Louis during the summer of 2015, which carries a cap hit of $7.5 million per season.

In 644 career games with the Blues, Tarasenko put up 262 goals and 291 assists for 553 points. He added 60 points in 90 playoff games, including 11 goals and six assists in 26 games when the Blues won the Stanley Cup in 2019. This year, he has been limited to 38 games, and has 10 goals and 29 points.

Mikkola is a hard-hitting 26-year-old stay-at-home defenseman with good size at 6’4”. Drafted by the Blues in the fifth round in 2015, he didn’t become a full-time NHL player until the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season. This year, he had three assists in 50 games with the Blues, and is on an expiring contract that carries a cap hit of $1.9 million. He’s also headed for unrestricted free agency this summer.

It remains to be seen whether the Rangers would be interested in extending either Tarasenko or Mikkola, but their salary-cap space is already at a premium. According to CapFriendly, the Rangers already have more than $67.4 million committed to 14 players for the 2023-24 season. Based on an anticipated cap ceiling of $83.5 million, that leaves just $16 million available to fill out their roster.

The Rangers have five key young players headed for restricted free agency, four of whom have arbitration rights. The biggest fish is 23-year-old center Filip Chytil, a first-round pick from 2017 who has broken out this season with 19 goals and 32 points. He carries a current cap hit of $2.3 million and has arbitration rights.

Defenseman K’Andre Miller, also 23 and a first-rounder from 2018, is also on an upward trajectory. He’s at a career high with 5-23-28 in 51 games and is in the conversation as a budding star. But his bargaining power is weaker than Chytil’s: he’s in the last year of his entry-level contract, making $925,000, and does not carry arbitration rights.

New deals will also be needed this summer for 2021 first-overall pick Alexis Lafreniere, who does not have arbitration rights, and forwards Julien Gauthier and Vitali Kravtsov, also former first-round picks, who do.

The Rangers were long rumored to have been on the lookout for more offensive firepower for this year’s playoff run, after they managed just one goal in each of their last three losses to the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2022 Eastern Conference Final.

Emily Kaplan of ESPN reported that the Rangers opted to acquire Tarasenko after also looking in on two of the biggest names available ahead of the NHL’s March 3 trade deadline — Timo Meier of the San Jose Sharks and Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks.

As for the Blues, they’ve had a disappointing season after winning their first playoff round since their 2019 championship against the Minnesota Wild last spring. Rather than being able to build off that success, they’ve regressed. They went into the all-star break on a five-game losing streak and sit 11th in the Western Conference heading into Thursday’s games, nine points out of a wild-card spot.

Trading Tarasenko appears to signal the start of a rebuild for the Blues, who locked up the two faces of their next wave of talent by giving maximum-term extensions to Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou before the beginning of this season. That puts the spotlight on a pair of other impending UFAs who were integral to the Stanley Cup run — captain and 2019 Conn Smythe Trophy winner Ryan O’Reilly, now 32, who has struggled with injuries this year and has been out of action with a broken foot, as well as 27-year-old utility forward Ivan Barbashev.

Part of the Blues’ return for Tarasenko was big winger Sammy Blais — a 26-year-old who was drafted and developed by St. Louis, then sent to the Rangers as part of the 2021 trade that brought Pavel Buchnevich to the Blues. Partly due to injuries, Blais struggled to find a role on Broadway. He’s also an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year.

The two draft picks the Blues receive both carry conditions. The Rangers currently hold their own first-round pick and that of the Dallas Stars, which was acquired when Nils Lundkvist was traded last September. St. Louis will receive the lower of those two picks — either way, likely to fall in the late first round of what’s said to be a talent-rich draft class.

The second pick comes in 2024 — a third-rounder if the Blueshirts make the playoffs this spring and a fourth-rounder if they don’t.

Heading into Thursday’s games, the Rangers sit third in the Metropolitan Division, six points ahead of the fourth-place Washington Capitals.

Hunter Skinner is a big right-shot defenseman, now 21, who was drafted in the fourth round by the Rangers in 2019. He has split his season between the ECHL’s Jacksonville Icemen and the AHL’s Hartford Wolf Pack.

To facilitate the trade, the Blues are also retaining 50% of Tarasenko’s $7.5 million cap hit for the rest of this season — the maximum amount allowed. Even with that retention, the Rangers now sit with just $94,400 of projected cap space, per CapFriendly.

Tarasenko’s contract carries a full no-trade clause, so the deal could not have happened without his approval. He made his fourth career appearance for St. Louis at All-Star Weekend in Florida last week and when asked about his future, notoriously told Jeremy Rutherford of The Athletic, “Even Vladi doesn’t know the future of Vladi.”

Now we know.