St. Louis Blues GM Doug Armstrong on Offer Sheets and Cap Space

Sportsnet 590 The FAN: St. Louis Blues GM Doug Armstrong on offer sheets, the Edmonton Oilers cap situation and the Blues overpaying but weaponizing their cap space.

** NHLRumors.com transcription

Ailish Forfar: “Offer sheets, which has seemed to be a little bit taboo at times. You said you would still offer sheet your mother, though, doesn’t matter.

So walk us through the process to send the Edmonton Oilers an offer sheet, and ultimately get two new players for St Louis Blues,

Armstrong: “Yeah, basically started around July 3 or 4th, second, third, fourth. I thought Jeff Jackson had a great start to free agency. He really improved his team up front. But to do that, you have to spend equity. And he, and the Oilers spend a little bit of cap equity and put us in a position to look to see if we can improve our team.

Teams that are different positions, in their, in their, their growth patterns right now. The Oilers, obviously, you know, one goal away from taking game seven to overtime.

And we’ve been there. We’ve had our success. Now we’re building it back up. And so we looked at the potential to add some young players that fit into our core group moving forward, that can grow.

We have a, I think we have a 10, 10 first round picks in a six year time frame on our roster or we’re on our reserve list. And if seven, let’s say 7, 6-7-8 of those guys make it, they can play together a long time. I believe that’s how you build a winning foundation is, is to have guys that can play together for a long time, and having first round picks that can play together for a long time, is important.

Jesse Rubinoff: “Ailish mentioned that the offer sheets are incredibly rare in today’s day and age in the National Hockey League. I believe there’s only been 10 since 2006.

What’s the process behind figuring out that you want to go out and do an offer sheet? Because if it’s so rare, I envision that it doesn’t come up all the time in conversation. Was it something that you just thought of because you knew about the Oilers situation, or did somebody else within the front office say, like, ‘hey, this might be a good opportunity to go out and do this.’

Because when it’s so rare, you just got me thinking, like, what, when? What would be the impetus to go out and do it now?

Armstrong: “Yeah, it was more just of the cap situation and where, where everyone is at at a certain time. And I’ve used the example a couple of times.

As you look at the you look at Boston right now, and I’m allowed to talk about (Jeremy) Smayman, he’s a restricted free agent. But they’ve, they’ve left a hefty amount of money there, yeah, for him. And then you look at the Red Wings also with two good players that left hefty amount of money.

So an offer sheet there, you know, I’m not speaking for the other teams. I don’t see an avenue to get players at that ilk, because of the situation. How they’ve set that up. Edmonton’s situation a little bit different.

Aspiring players, growing players that we, we overpaid, obviously, like, if you look at their their career, what they’ve done to date, that doesn’t match what their contracts are. But, you know, cap spaces is a, is a weapon. And we had the cap space and we don’t, we weren’t going to use it in another fashion this year or likely next year. So we wanted to use it to try and acquire young players.